Neural Generation Meets Real People: Building a Social, Informative Open-Domain Dialogue Agent

SIGDIAL (ACL) 2022 · Ethan A. Chi, Ashwin Paranjape, Abigail See, Caleb Chiam, Trenton Chang, Kathleen Kenealy, Swee Kiat Lim, Amelia Hardy, Chetanya Rastogi, Haojun Li, Alexander Iyabor, Yutong He, Hari Sowrirajan, Peng Qi, Kaushik Ram Sadagopan, Nguyet Minh Phu, Dilara Soylu, Jillian Tang, Avanika Narayan, Giovanni Campagna, Christopher D. Manning ·

We present Chirpy Cardinal, an open-domain social chatbot. Aiming to be both informative and conversational, our bot chats with users in an authentic, emotionally intelligent way. By integrating controlled neural generation with scaffolded, hand-written dialogue, we let both the user and bot take turns driving the conversation, producing an engaging and socially fluent experience. Deployed in the fourth iteration of the Alexa Prize Socialbot Grand Challenge, Chirpy Cardinal handled thousands of conversations per day, placing second out of nine bots with an average user rating of 3.58/5.