OTT ers: One-turn Topic Transitions for Open-Domain Dialogue (2021)

Abstract: Mixed initiative in open-domain dialogue requires a system to pro-actively introduce new topics. The one-turn topic transition task explores how a system connects two topics in a cooperative and coherent manner. The goal of the task is to generate a “bridging” utterance connecting the new topic to the topic of the previous conversation turn. We are especially interested in commonsense explanations of how a new topic relates to what has been mentioned before. We first collect a new dataset of human one-turn topic transitions, which we callOTTers. We then explore different strategies used by humans when asked to complete such a task, and notice that the use of a bridging utterance to connect the two topics is the approach used the most. We finally show how existing state-of-the-art text generation models can be adapted to this task and examine the performance of these baselines on different splits of the OTTers data.

## introduction for a conversation to be truly engaging, we typically assume that both participants take initiative, e.g. by introducing a new topic. we call this a mixed-initiative dialogue. open-domain systems trained on vast amounts of data @xcite @xcite @xcite , however, are often purely responsive, make abrupt transitions, or fail to take initiative (see examples in ## experiments having confirmed the quality of our corpus, we now adapt two existing text generation models as baselines for this task. we also explore different train-dev-test splits and conduct an error analysis. ## discussion & conclusion ethical considerations. we recognise that any mixed-initiative dialogue system carries risks related to dual-use: in addition to helpful systems which serve to help users explore a new topic or discover more about the world, a system which can effectively change the topic of conversation could also be used to manipulate user behaviour. for example, bridging strategies for topic transitions could be used by virtual assistants to encourage users to make a purchase or to express their opinion or preference regarding sensitive subjects.