# SalesBot: Transitioning from Chit-Chat to Task-Oriented Dialogues

## Framework
<p align="center">
	<img src="img/framework.png" width="100%" />
</p>
This paper focuses on investigating the conversations starting from open-domain social chatting and then gradually transitioning to task-oriented purposes, and releases a large-scale dataset with detailed annotations for encouraging this research direction. To achieve this goal, this paper proposes a framework to automatically generate many dialogues without human involvement, in which any powerful open-domain dialogue generation model can be easily leveraged.

## Dependency
Check the packages needed or simply run the command
```console
conda env create -f environment.yml
```

## Data
* selfchat:
```console
mkdir selfchat
parlai self_chat --model-file zoo:blender/blender_1Bdistill/model --inference nucleus --num-self-chats 20 --task blended_skill_talk --include-personas True --include-initial-utterances True --outfile selfchat/merge_sgd_20.json
parlai self_chat --model-file zoo:blender/blender_1Bdistill/model --inference nucleus --num-self-chats 20 --task blended_skill_talk --include-personas True --include-initial-utterances True --outfile selfchat/simulators_20.json
```
* intent detection model:
```console
python3 qa_inference.py --data_file selfchat/merge_sgd_20.jsonl --output_file merge_sgd_intent.json --device 0
python3 qa_inference.py --data_file selfchat/simulators_20.jsonl --output_file simulators_intent.json --device 0
```
* task-oriented simulators:
```console
python3 combine_simulators.py simulators_intent.json
```
* merge SGD:
```console
# SGD_delex is the version preprocessed by "ACCENTOR: Adding Chit-Chat to Enhance Task-Oriented Dialogues"
unzip SGD_delex
mkdir sgd_intent_dialog
python3 collect_sgd_intent.py SGD_delex
python3 combine_sgd.py merge_sgd_intent.json

```
* transition:
```console
python3 transition.py combine_sgd.json
python3 transition.py combine_simulators.json
```

## Citation

Please cite our paper if you use SalesBot in your work:

```bibtex
@inproceedings{chiu2022salesbot,
   title={{SalesBot}: Transitioning from Chit-Chat to Task-Oriented Dialogues},
   author={Chiu, Ssu and Li, Maolin and Lin, Yen-Ting and Chen, Yun-Nung},
   booktitle={Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL)},
   year={2022}
}
```