We present "Human or Not?", an online game inspired by the Turing test, that measures the capability of AI chatbots to mimic humans in dialog, and of humans to tell bots from other humans. Over the course of a month, the game was played by over 1.5 million users who engaged in anonymous two-minute chat sessions with either another human or an AI language model which was prompted to behave like humans. The task of the players was to correctly guess whether they spoke to a person or to an AI. This largest scale Turing-style test conducted to date revealed some interesting facts. For example, overall users guessed the identity of their partners correctly in only 68% of the games. In the subset of the games in which users faced an AI bot, users had even lower correct guess rates of 60% (that is, not much higher than chance). This white paper details the development, deployment, and results of this unique experiment. While this experiment calls for many extensions and refinements, these findings already begin to shed light on the inevitable near future which will commingle humans and AI.
Apart from the coherence and fluency of responses, an empathetic chatbot emphasizes more on people's feelings. By considering altruistic behaviors between human interaction, empathetic chatbots enable people to get a better interactive and supportive experience. This study presents a framework whereby several empathetic chatbots are based on understanding users' implied feelings and replying empathetically for multiple dialogue turns. We call these chatbots CheerBots. CheerBots can be retrieval-based or generative-based and were finetuned by deep reinforcement learning. To respond in an empathetic way, we develop a simulating agent, a Conceptual Human Model, as aids for CheerBots in training with considerations on changes in user's emotional states in the future to arouse sympathy. Finally, automatic metrics and human rating results demonstrate that CheerBots outperform other baseline chatbots and achieves reciprocal altruism. The code and the pre-trained models will be made available.
Over the last two decades, technology use in language learning and teaching has significantly advanced and is now referred to as Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL). Recently, the integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) into CALL has brought about a significant shift in the traditional approach to language education both inside and outside the classroom. In line with this book's scope, I explore the advantages and disadvantages of AI-mediated communication in language education. I begin with a brief review of AI in education. I then introduce the ICALL and give a critical appraisal of the potential of AI-powered automatic speech recognition (ASR), Machine Translation (MT), Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs), AI-powered chatbots, and Extended Reality (XR). In conclusion, I argue that it is crucial for language teachers to engage in CALL teacher education and professional development to keep up with the ever-evolving technology landscape and improve their teaching effectiveness.
Generative Pre-trained Transformer 4 (GPT-4) is the fourth-generation language model in the GPT series, developed by OpenAI, which promises significant advancements in the field of natural language processing (NLP). In this research article, we have discussed the features of GPT-4, its potential applications, and the challenges that it might face. We have also compared GPT-4 with its predecessor, GPT-3. GPT-4 has a larger model size (more than one trillion), better multilingual capabilities, improved contextual understanding, and reasoning capabilities than GPT-3. Some of the potential applications of GPT-4 include chatbots, personal assistants, language translation, text summarization, and question-answering. However, GPT-4 poses several challenges and limitations such as computational requirements, data requirements, and ethical concerns.
Along with the development of systems for natural language understanding and generation, dialog systems have been widely adopted for language learning and practicing. Many current educational dialog systems perform chitchat, where the generated content and vocabulary are not constrained. However, for learners in a school setting, practice through dialog is more effective if it aligns with students' curriculum and focuses on textbook vocabulary. Therefore, we adapt lexically constrained decoding to a dialog system, which urges the dialog system to include curriculum-aligned words and phrases in its generated utterances. We adopt a generative dialog system, BlenderBot3, as our backbone model and evaluate our curriculum-based dialog system with middle school students learning English as their second language. The constrained words and phrases are derived from their textbooks, suggested by their English teachers. The evaluation result demonstrates that the dialog system with curriculum infusion improves students' understanding of target words and increases their interest in practicing English.
Chatbots based on Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown strong capabilities in language understanding. In this study, we explore the potential of LLMs in assisting corpus-based linguistic studies through automatic annotation of texts with specific categories of linguistic information. Specifically, we examined to what extent LLMs understand the functional elements constituting the speech act of apology from a local grammar perspective, by comparing the performance of ChatGPT (powered by GPT-3.5), Bing chatbot (powered by GPT-4), and a human coder in the annotation task. The results demonstrate that Bing chatbot significantly outperformed ChatGPT in the task. Compared to human annotator, the overall performance of Bing chatbot was slightly less satisfactory. However, it already achieved high F1 scores: 99.95% for the tag of APOLOGISING, 91.91% for REASON, 95.35% for APOLOGISER, 89.74% for APOLOGISEE, and 96.47% for INTENSIFIER. Therefore, we propose that LLM-assisted annotation is a promising automated approach for corpus studies.
Natural Language Generation tools, such as chatbots that can generate human-like conversational text, are becoming more common both for personal and professional use. However, there are concerns about their trustworthiness and ethical implications. The paper addresses the problem of understanding how different users (e.g., linguists, engineers) perceive and adopt these tools and their perception of machine-generated text quality. It also discusses the perceived advantages and limitations of Natural Language Generation tools, as well as users' beliefs on governance strategies. The main findings of this study include the impact of users' field and level of expertise on the perceived trust and adoption of Natural Language Generation tools, the users' assessment of the accuracy, fluency, and potential biases of machine-generated text in comparison to human-written text, and an analysis of the advantages and ethical risks associated with these tools as identified by the participants. Moreover, this paper discusses the potential implications of these findings for enhancing the AI development process. The paper sheds light on how different user characteristics shape their beliefs on the quality and overall trustworthiness of machine-generated text. Furthermore, it examines the benefits and risks of these tools from the perspectives of different users.
Conversational models that are generative and open-domain are particularly susceptible to generating unsafe content since they are trained on web-based social data. Prior approaches to mitigating this issue have drawbacks, such as disrupting the flow of conversation, limited generalization to unseen toxic input contexts, and sacrificing the quality of the dialogue for the sake of safety. In this paper, we present a novel framework, named "LOT" (Learn NOT to), that employs a contrastive loss to enhance generalization by learning from both positive and negative training signals. Our approach differs from the standard contrastive learning framework in that it automatically obtains positive and negative signals from the safe and unsafe language distributions that have been learned beforehand. The LOT framework utilizes divergence to steer the generations away from the unsafe subspace and towards the safe subspace while sustaining the flow of conversation. Our approach is memory and time-efficient during decoding and effectively reduces toxicity while preserving engagingness and fluency. Empirical results indicate that LOT reduces toxicity by up to four-fold while achieving four to six-fold higher rates of engagingness and fluency compared to baseline models. Our findings are further corroborated by human evaluation.
Large language models (LLMs) and LLM-driven chatbots such as ChatGPT have shown remarkable capacities in comprehending and producing language. However, their internal workings remain a black box in cognitive terms, and it is unclear whether LLMs and chatbots can develop humanlike characteristics in language use. Cognitive scientists have devised many experiments that probe, and have made great progress in explaining, how people process language. We subjected ChatGPT to 12 of these experiments, pre-registered and with 1,000 runs per experiment. In 10 of them, ChatGPT replicated the human pattern of language use. It associated unfamiliar words with different meanings depending on their forms, continued to access recently encountered meanings of ambiguous words, reused recent sentence structures, reinterpreted implausible sentences that were likely to have been corrupted by noise, glossed over errors, drew reasonable inferences, associated causality with different discourse entities according to verb semantics, and accessed different meanings and retrieved different words depending on the identity of its interlocutor. However, unlike humans, it did not prefer using shorter words to convey less informative content and it did not use context to disambiguate syntactic ambiguities. We discuss how these convergences and divergences may occur in the transformer architecture. Overall, these experiments demonstrate that LLM-driven chatbots like ChatGPT are capable of mimicking human language processing to a great extent, and that they have the potential to provide insights into how people learn and use language.
The recent release of large language model (LLM) based chatbots, such as ChatGPT, has attracted significant attention on foundations models. It is widely believed that foundation models will serve as the fundamental building blocks for future AI systems. As foundation models are in their early stages, the design of foundation model based systems has not yet been systematically explored. There is little understanding about the impact of introducing foundation models in software architecture. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a taxonomy of foundation model based systems, which classifies and compares the characteristics of foundation models and foundation model based systems. Our taxonomy comprises three categories: foundation model pretraining and fine-tuning, architecture design of foundation model based systems, and responsible-AI-by-design. This taxonomy provides concrete guidance for making major design decisions when designing foundation model based systems and highlights trade-offs arising from design decisions.