
What Makes a Good Conversation? - strin
http://www.abigailsee.com/2019/08/13/what-makes-a-good-conversation.html
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stephenroller
Co-author of the original paper, if you have any questions.

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thomk
Hi Stephen. What was your motivation behind authoring this paper?

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stephenroller
We originally set out to see whether we could use conditional generation to
sort of adjust the behavior of these neural generative dialogue systems. Much
of the original idea was about sort of "planning" our response to improve the
quality and diversity of neural generation.

As we studied though, we became more aware of how much nuance there was in
each of these methods, especially when we started having humans chat with the
models. In the end, the paper ended up being more of a thorough analysis into
what behaviors are more preferred in dialogue agents. For example, we found
that you should spend about ~60-70% of your turns asking questions to maximize
engagement: enough to convey interest in your partner without coming off as
super nosy.

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matchagaucho
That's amazing. Do you have any hobbies?

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stephenroller
Yes, that's a great response for one of the models to have. :)

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zitterbewegung
How is the weather?

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skybrian
I'm wondering if more elaborate personas might result in more interesting
conversations? For example, impersonating a famous person from history, or
perhaps a character in a novel based on their dialog.

