Educational chatbots are a promising tool for assisting student learning. However, the development of effective chatbots in education has been challenging, as high-quality data is seldom available in this domain. In this paper, we propose a framework for generating synthetic teacher-student interactions grounded in a set of textbooks. Our approaches capture one aspect of learning interactions where curious students with partial knowledge interactively ask a teacher questions about the material in the textbook. We highlight various quality criteria that such dialogues should fulfill and compare several approaches relying on either prompting or fine-tuning large language models. We use synthetic dialogues to train educational chatbots and show benefits of further fine-tuning in different educational domains. However, human evaluation shows that our best data synthesis method still suffers from hallucinations and tends to reiterate information from previous conversations. Our findings offer insights for future efforts in synthesizing conversational data that strikes a balance between size and quality. We will open-source our data and code.
Large language models (LLMs) exhibit powerful general intelligence across diverse scenarios, including their integration into chatbots. However, a vital challenge of LLM-based chatbots is that they may produce hallucinated content in responses, which significantly limits their applicability. Various efforts have been made to alleviate hallucination, such as retrieval augmented generation and reinforcement learning with human feedback, but most of them require additional training and data annotation. In this paper, we propose a novel post-hoc Citation-Enhanced Generation (CEG) approach combined with retrieval argumentation. Unlike previous studies that focus on preventing hallucinations during generation, our method addresses this issue in a post-hoc way. It incorporates a retrieval module to search for supporting documents relevant to the generated content, and employs a natural language inference-based citation generation module. Once the statements in the generated content lack of reference, our model can regenerate responses until all statements are supported by citations. Note that our method is a training-free plug-and-play plugin that is capable of various LLMs. Experiments on various hallucination-related datasets show our framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both hallucination detection and response regeneration on three benchmarks. Our codes and dataset will be publicly available.
Since the breakthrough of ChatGPT, large language models (LLMs) have garnered significant attention in the research community. With the development of LLMs, the question of text style transfer for conversational models has emerged as a natural extension, where chatbots may possess their own styles or even characters. However, standard evaluation metrics have not yet been established for this new settings. This paper aims to address this issue by proposing the LMStyle Benchmark, a novel evaluation framework applicable to chat-style text style transfer (C-TST), that can measure the quality of style transfer for LLMs in an automated and scalable manner. In addition to conventional style strength metrics, LMStyle Benchmark further considers a novel aspect of metrics called appropriateness, a high-level metrics take account of coherence, fluency and other implicit factors without the aid of reference samples. Our experiments demonstrate that the new evaluation methods introduced by LMStyle Benchmark have a higher correlation with human judgments in terms of appropriateness. Based on LMStyle Benchmark, we present a comprehensive list of evaluation results for popular LLMs, including LLaMA, Alpaca, and Vicuna, reflecting their stylistic properties, such as formality and sentiment strength, along with their appropriateness.
This work introduces LAB (Large-scale Alignment for chatBots), a novel methodology designed to overcome the scalability challenges in the instruction-tuning phase of large language model (LLM) training. Leveraging a taxonomy-guided synthetic data generation process and a multi-phase tuning framework, LAB significantly reduces reliance on expensive human annotations and proprietary models like GPT-4. We demonstrate that LAB-trained models can achieve competitive performance across several benchmarks compared to models trained with traditional human-annotated or GPT-4 generated synthetic data. Thus offering a scalable, cost-effective solution for enhancing LLM capabilities and instruction-following behaviors without the drawbacks of catastrophic forgetting, marking a step forward in the efficient training of LLMs for a wide range of applications.
Cyberbullying harms teenagers' mental health, and teaching them upstanding intervention is crucial. Wizard-of-Oz studies show chatbots can scale up personalized and interactive cyberbullying education, but implementing such chatbots is a challenging and delicate task. We created a no-code chatbot design tool for K-12 teachers. Using large language models and prompt chaining, our tool allows teachers to prototype bespoke dialogue flows and chatbot utterances. In offering this tool, we explore teachers' distinctive needs when designing chatbots to assist their teaching, and how chatbot design tools might better support them. Our findings reveal that teachers welcome the tool enthusiastically. Moreover, they see themselves as playwrights guiding both the students' and the chatbot's behaviors, while allowing for some improvisation. Their goal is to enable students to rehearse both desirable and undesirable reactions to cyberbullying in a safe environment. We discuss the design opportunities LLM-Chains offer for empowering teachers and the research opportunities this work opens up.
The advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) has led to significant enhancements in the performance of chatbot systems. Many researchers have dedicated their efforts to the development of bringing characteristics to chatbots. While there have been commercial products for developing role-driven chatbots using LLMs, it is worth noting that academic research in this area remains relatively scarce. Our research focuses on investigating the performance of LLMs in constructing Characteristic AI Agents by simulating real-life individuals across different settings. Current investigations have primarily focused on act on roles with simple profiles. In response to this research gap, we create a benchmark for the characteristic AI agents task, including dataset, techniques, and evaluation metrics. A dataset called ``Character100'' is built for this benchmark, comprising the most-visited people on Wikipedia for language models to role-play. With the constructed dataset, we conduct comprehensive assessment of LLMs across various settings. In addition, we devise a set of automatic metrics for quantitative performance evaluation. The experimental results underscore the potential directions for further improvement in the capabilities of LLMs in constructing characteristic AI agents. The benchmark is available at https://github.com/nuaa-nlp/Character100.
Recent chatbots have demonstrated impressive ability to understand and communicate in raw-text form. However, there is more to the world than raw text. For example, humans spend long hours of their time on web pages, where text is intertwined with other modalities and tasks are accomplished in the form of various complex interactions. Can state-of-the-art multi-modal models generalize to such complex domains? To address this question, we introduce TurkingBench, a benchmark of tasks formulated as web pages containing textual instructions with multi-modal context. Unlike existing work which employs artificially synthesized web pages, here we use natural HTML pages that were originally designed for crowdsourcing workers for various annotation purposes. The HTML instructions of each task are also instantiated with various values (obtained from the crowdsourcing tasks) to form new instances of the task. This benchmark contains 32.2K instances distributed across 158 tasks. Additionally, to facilitate the evaluation on TurkingBench, we develop an evaluation framework that connects the responses of chatbots to modifications on web pages (modifying a text box, checking a radio, etc.). We evaluate the performance of state-of-the-art models, including language-only, vision-only, and layout-only models, and their combinations, on this benchmark. Our findings reveal that these models perform significantly better than random chance, yet considerable room exists for improvement. We hope this benchmark will help facilitate the evaluation and development of web-based agents.
The Canadian air travel sector has seen a significant increase in flight delays, cancellations, and other issues concerning passenger rights. Recognizing this demand, we present a chatbot to assist passengers and educate them about their rights. Our system breaks a complex user input into simple queries which are used to retrieve information from a collection of documents detailing air travel regulations. The most relevant passages from these documents are presented along with links to the original documents and the generated queries, enabling users to dissect and leverage the information for their unique circumstances. The system successfully overcomes two predominant challenges: understanding complex user inputs, and delivering accurate answers, free of hallucinations, that passengers can rely on for making informed decisions. A user study comparing the chatbot to a Google search demonstrated the chatbot's usefulness and ease of use. Beyond the primary goal of providing accurate and timely information to air passengers regarding their rights, we hope that this system will also enable further research exploring the tradeoff between the user-friendly conversational interface of chatbots and the accuracy of retrieval systems.
This research provides an in-depth comprehensive review of the progress of chatbot technology over time, from the initial basic systems relying on rules to today's advanced conversational bots powered by artificial intelligence. Spanning many decades, the paper explores the major milestones, innovations, and paradigm shifts that have driven the evolution of chatbots. Looking back at the very basic statistical model in 1906 via the early chatbots, such as ELIZA and ALICE in the 1960s and 1970s, the study traces key innovations leading to today's advanced conversational agents, such as ChatGPT and Google Bard. The study synthesizes insights from academic literature and industry sources to highlight crucial milestones, including the introduction of Turing tests, influential projects such as CALO, and recent transformer-based models. Tracing the path forward, the paper highlights how natural language processing and machine learning have been integrated into modern chatbots for more sophisticated capabilities. This chronological survey of the chatbot landscape provides a holistic reference to understand the technological and historical factors propelling conversational AI. By synthesizing learnings from this historical analysis, the research offers important context about the developmental trajectory of chatbots and their immense future potential across various field of application which could be the potential take ways for the respective research community and stakeholders.
Recent large language models (LLMs) offer the potential to support public health monitoring by facilitating health disclosure through open-ended conversations but rarely preserve the knowledge gained about individuals across repeated interactions. Augmenting LLMs with long-term memory (LTM) presents an opportunity to improve engagement and self-disclosure, but we lack an understanding of how LTM impacts people's interaction with LLM-driven chatbots in public health interventions. We examine the case of CareCall -- an LLM-driven voice chatbot with LTM -- through the analysis of 1,252 call logs and interviews with nine users. We found that LTM enhanced health disclosure and fostered positive perceptions of the chatbot by offering familiarity. However, we also observed challenges in promoting self-disclosure through LTM, particularly around addressing chronic health conditions and privacy concerns. We discuss considerations for LTM integration in LLM-driven chatbots for public health monitoring, including carefully deciding what topics need to be remembered in light of public health goals.