CantTalkAboutThis: Aligning Language Models to Stay on Topic in Dialogues

Recent advancements in instruction-tuning datasets have predominantly focused on specific tasks like mathematical or logical reasoning. There has been a notable gap in data designed for aligning language models to maintain topic relevance in conversations - a critical aspect for deploying chatbots to production. We introduce the CantTalkAboutThis dataset to help language models remain focused on the subject at hand during task-oriented interactions. It consists of synthetic dialogues on a wide range of conversation topics from different domains. These dialogues are interspersed with distractor turns that intentionally divert the chatbot from the predefined topic. Fine-tuning language models on this dataset helps make them resilient to deviating from the role assigned and improves their ability to maintain topical coherence compared to general-purpose instruction-tuned LLMs like GPT-4-turbo and Mixtral-Instruct. Additionally, preliminary observations suggest that training models on this dataset also enhance their performance on fine-grained instruction following tasks.

PSYDIAL: Personality-based Synthetic Dialogue Generation using Large Language Models

We present a novel end-to-end personality-based synthetic dialogue data generation pipeline, specifically designed to elicit responses from large language models via prompting. We design the prompts to generate more human-like dialogues considering real-world scenarios when users engage with chatbots. We introduce PSYDIAL, the first Korean dialogue dataset focused on personality-based dialogues, curated using our proposed pipeline. Notably, we focus on the Extraversion dimension of the Big Five personality model in our research. Experimental results indicate that while pre-trained models and those fine-tuned with a chit-chat dataset struggle to generate responses reflecting personality, models trained with PSYDIAL show significant improvements. The versatility of our pipeline extends beyond dialogue tasks, offering potential for other non-dialogue related applications. This research opens doors for more nuanced, personality-driven conversational AI in Korean and potentially other languages. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/jiSilverH/psydial.

Bioinformatics and Biomedical Informatics with ChatGPT: Year One Review

The year 2023 marked a significant surge in the exploration of applying large language model (LLM) chatbots, notably ChatGPT, across various disciplines. We surveyed the applications of ChatGPT in various sectors of bioinformatics and biomedical informatics throughout the year, covering omics, genetics, biomedical text mining, drug discovery, biomedical image understanding, bioinformatics programming, and bioinformatics education. Our survey delineates the current strengths and limitations of this chatbot in bioinformatics and offers insights into potential avenues for future development.

Characteristic AI Agents via Large Language Models

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.

Tur[k]ingBench: A Challenge Benchmark for Web Agents

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.

To Recommend or Not: Recommendability Identification in Conversations with Pre-trained Language Models

Most current recommender systems primarily focus on what to recommend, assuming users always require personalized recommendations. However, with the widely spread of ChatGPT and other chatbots, a more crucial problem in the context of conversational systems is how to minimize user disruption when we provide recommendation services for users. While previous research has extensively explored different user intents in dialogue systems, fewer efforts are made to investigate whether recommendations should be provided. In this paper, we formally define the recommendability identification problem, which aims to determine whether recommendations are necessary in a specific scenario. First, we propose and define the recommendability identification task, which investigates the need for recommendations in the current conversational context. A new dataset is constructed. Subsequently, we discuss and evaluate the feasibility of leveraging pre-trained language models (PLMs) for recommendability identification. Finally, through comparative experiments, we demonstrate that directly employing PLMs with zero-shot results falls short of meeting the task requirements. Besides, fine-tuning or utilizing soft prompt techniques yields comparable results to traditional classification methods. Our work is the first to study recommendability before recommendation and provides preliminary ways to make it a fundamental component of the future recommendation system.

History of generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) chatbots: past, present, and future development

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.

ChatGPT Incorrectness Detection in Software Reviews

We conducted a survey of 135 software engineering (SE) practitioners to understand how they use Generative AI-based chatbots like ChatGPT for SE tasks. We find that they want to use ChatGPT for SE tasks like software library selection but often worry about the truthfulness of ChatGPT responses. We developed a suite of techniques and a tool called CID (ChatGPT Incorrectness Detector) to automatically test and detect the incorrectness in ChatGPT responses. CID is based on the iterative prompting to ChatGPT by asking it contextually similar but textually divergent questions (using an approach that utilizes metamorphic relationships in texts). The underlying principle in CID is that for a given question, a response that is different from other responses (across multiple incarnations of the question) is likely an incorrect response. In a benchmark study of library selection, we show that CID can detect incorrect responses from ChatGPT with an F1-score of 0.74 - 0.75.

MutaBot: A Mutation Testing Approach for Chatbots

Mutation testing is a technique aimed at assessing the effectiveness of test suites by seeding artificial faults into programs. Although available for many platforms and languages, no mutation testing tool is currently available for conversational chatbots, which represent an increasingly popular solution to design systems that can interact with users through a natural language interface. Note that since conversations must be explicitly engineered by the developers of conversational chatbots, these systems are exposed to specific types of faults not supported by existing mutation testing tools. In this paper, we present MutaBot, a mutation testing tool for conversational chatbots. MutaBot addresses mutations at multiple levels, including conversational flows, intents, and contexts. We designed the tool to potentially target multiple platforms, while we implemented initial support for Google Dialogflow chatbots. We assessed the tool with three Dialogflow chatbots and test cases generated with Botium, revealing weaknesses in the test suites.

Extending Interactive Science Exhibits into the Classroom using Anthropomorphized Chatbots and Bloom's Taxonomy

This study explores the use of Generative AI chatbots for transforming public science exhibits into virtual experiences that can extend the engagement of exhibits into the classroom. The broader goal is to increase accessibility of science exhibits, especially for those marginalized in STEM due to various factors, including cultural barriers. We hypothesize that turning exhibits into first-person anthropomorphized chatbots with a personality, like quirky-talking asteroids or comets, can increase engagement and learning. The paper mainly explores if such techniques are possible using Generative AI (e.g. GPT) via prompt engineering alone. The research includes an investigation into the possibility of integrating interactive assessment via question-generation using Bloom's Taxonomy. Initial results indicate that it is possible to combine these techniques. As such, it lays a foundation for future classroom evaluations of such chatbots to gauge their overall efficacy in extending the reach of science exhibitions. The paper concludes by discussing extensions of the research to fully evaluate effectiveness in virtual field-trips. We also include a brief examination of additional ways to enhance student motivation towards learning via chatbots.