Daily Papers

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have showcased their exceptional abilities across various tasks, such as code generation, problem-solving and reasoning. Existing benchmarks evaluate tasks in isolation, yet the extent to which LLMs can understand prose-style tasks, identify the underlying problems, and then generate appropriate code solutions is still unexplored. Addressing this gap, we introduce PECC, a novel benchmark derived from Advent Of Code (AoC) challenges and Project Euler, including 2396 problems. Unlike conventional benchmarks, PECC requires LLMs to interpret narrative-embedded problems, extract requirements, and generate executable code. A key feature of our dataset is the complexity added by natural language prompting in chat-based evaluations, mirroring real-world instruction ambiguities. Results show varying model performance between narrative and neutral problems, with specific challenges in the Euler math-based subset with GPT-3.5-Turbo passing 50% of the AoC challenges and only 8% on the Euler problems. By probing the limits of LLMs' capabilities, our benchmark provides a framework to monitor and assess the subsequent progress of LLMs as a universal problem solver.

The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) as chat assistants capable of generating human-like conversations has amplified the need for robust evaluation methods, particularly for open-ended tasks. Conventional metrics like BLEU and ROUGE, while useful, are increasingly inadequate for capturing the subtle semantics and contextual richness of such generative outputs. We propose a reference-guided verdict method that automates the evaluation process by leveraging multiple LLMs-as-judges. Through experiments on three open-ended question-answering tasks, we demonstrate that combining multiple LLMs-as-judges significantly improves the reliability and accuracy of evaluations, particularly in complex tasks where a single model might struggle. Our findings reveal a strong correlation with human evaluations, establishing our method as a viable and effective alternative to traditional metrics and human judgments, particularly in the context of LLM-based chat assistants where the complexity and diversity of responses challenge existing benchmarks.

In recent years, several high-performance conversational systems have been proposed based on the Transformer encoder-decoder model. Although previous studies analyzed the effects of the model parameters and the decoding method on subjective dialogue evaluations with overall metrics, they did not analyze how the differences of fine-tuning datasets affect on user's detailed impression. In addition, the Transformer-based approach has only been verified for English, not for such languages with large inter-language distances as Japanese. In this study, we develop large-scale Transformer-based Japanese dialogue models and Japanese chit-chat datasets to examine the effectiveness of the Transformer-based approach for building chit-chat dialogue systems. We evaluated and analyzed the impressions of human dialogues in different fine-tuning datasets, model parameters, and the use of additional information.

Large language models (LLMs) excel at general question-answering (Q&A) but often fall short in specialized domains due to a lack of domain-specific knowledge. Commercial companies face the dual challenges of privacy protection and resource constraints when involving LLMs for fine-tuning. This paper propose a novel framework, Self-Evolution, designed to address these issues by leveraging lightweight open-source LLMs through multiple iterative fine-tuning rounds. To enhance the efficiency of iterative fine-tuning, Self-Evolution employ a strategy that filters and reinforces the knowledge with higher value during the iterative process. We employed Self-Evolution on Qwen1.5-7B-Chat using 4,000 documents containing rich domain knowledge from China Mobile, achieving a performance score 174% higher on domain-specific question-answering evaluations than Qwen1.5-7B-Chat and even 22% higher than Qwen1.5-72B-Chat. Self-Evolution has been deployed in China Mobile's daily operation and maintenance for 117 days, and it improves the efficiency of locating alarms, fixing problems, and finding related reports, with an average efficiency improvement of over 18.6%. In addition, we release Self-Evolution framework code in https://github.com/Zero-Pointer/Self-Evolution.

In this work, we develop and release Llama 2, a collection of pretrained and fine-tuned large language models (LLMs) ranging in scale from 7 billion to 70 billion parameters. Our fine-tuned LLMs, called Llama 2-Chat, are optimized for dialogue use cases. Our models outperform open-source chat models on most benchmarks we tested, and based on our human evaluations for helpfulness and safety, may be a suitable substitute for closed-source models. We provide a detailed description of our approach to fine-tuning and safety improvements of Llama 2-Chat in order to enable the community to build on our work and contribute to the responsible development of LLMs.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional capabilities across various natural language processing tasks. Due to their training on internet-sourced datasets, LLMs can sometimes generate objectionable content, necessitating extensive alignment with human feedback to avoid such outputs. Despite massive alignment efforts, LLMs remain susceptible to adversarial jailbreak attacks, which usually are manipulated prompts designed to circumvent safety mechanisms and elicit harmful responses. Here, we introduce a novel approach, Directed Rrepresentation Optimization Jailbreak (DROJ), which optimizes jailbreak prompts at the embedding level to shift the hidden representations of harmful queries towards directions that are more likely to elicit affirmative responses from the model. Our evaluations on LLaMA-2-7b-chat model show that DROJ achieves a 100\% keyword-based Attack Success Rate (ASR), effectively preventing direct refusals. However, the model occasionally produces repetitive and non-informative responses. To mitigate this, we introduce a helpfulness system prompt that enhances the utility of the model's responses. Our code is available at https://github.com/Leon-Leyang/LLM-Safeguard.

Large language models (LLMs) have had a huge impact on society due to their impressive capabilities and vast knowledge of the world. Various applications and tools have been created that allow users to interact with these models in a black-box scenario. However, one limitation of this scenario is that users cannot modify the internal knowledge of the model, and the only way to add or modify internal knowledge is by explicitly mentioning it to the model during the current interaction. This learning process is called in-context training, and it refers to training that is confined to the user's current session or context. In-context learning has significant applications, but also has limitations that are seldom studied. In this paper, we present a study that shows how the model can suffer from interference between information that continually flows in the context, causing it to forget previously learned knowledge, which can reduce the model's performance. Along with showing the problem, we propose an evaluation benchmark based on the bAbI dataset.

The recent success of large language models (LLMs) has shown great potential to develop more powerful conversational recommender systems (CRSs), which rely on natural language conversations to satisfy user needs. In this paper, we embark on an investigation into the utilization of ChatGPT for conversational recommendation, revealing the inadequacy of the existing evaluation protocol. It might over-emphasize the matching with the ground-truth items or utterances generated by human annotators, while neglecting the interactive nature of being a capable CRS. To overcome the limitation, we further propose an interactive Evaluation approach based on LLMs named iEvaLM that harnesses LLM-based user simulators. Our evaluation approach can simulate various interaction scenarios between users and systems. Through the experiments on two publicly available CRS datasets, we demonstrate notable improvements compared to the prevailing evaluation protocol. Furthermore, we emphasize the evaluation of explainability, and ChatGPT showcases persuasive explanation generation for its recommendations. Our study contributes to a deeper comprehension of the untapped potential of LLMs for CRSs and provides a more flexible and easy-to-use evaluation framework for future research endeavors. The codes and data are publicly available at https://github.com/RUCAIBox/iEvaLM-CRS.

Although large language models (LLMs) have achieved excellent performance in a variety of evaluation benchmarks, they still struggle in complex reasoning tasks which require specific knowledge and multi-hop reasoning. To improve the reasoning abilities, we propose ChatCoT, a tool-augmented chain-of-thought reasoning framework for chat-based LLMs. In ChatCoT, we model the chain-of-thought~(CoT) reasoning as multi-turn conversations, to utilize tools in a more natural way through chatting. At each turn, LLMs can either interact with tools or perform the reasoning. Our approach can effectively leverage the multi-turn conversation ability of chat-based LLMs, and integrate the thought chain following and tools manipulation in a unified way. Specially, we initialize the early turns of the conversation by the tools, tasks and reasoning format, and propose an iterative tool-augmented reasoning step to perform step-by-step tool-augmented reasoning. The experiment results on two complex reasoning datasets (MATH and HotpotQA) have shown the effectiveness of ChatCoT on complex reasoning tasks, achieving a 6.8\% relative improvement over the state-of-the-art baseline. Our code and data are available at: https://github.com/RUCAIBOX/ChatCoT.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have showcased remarkable capabilities in various Natural Language Processing tasks. For automatic open-domain dialogue evaluation in particular, LLMs have been seamlessly integrated into evaluation frameworks, and together with human evaluation, compose the backbone of most evaluations. However, existing evaluation benchmarks often rely on outdated datasets and evaluate aspects like Fluency and Relevance, which fail to adequately capture the capabilities and limitations of state-of-the-art chatbot models. This paper critically examines current evaluation benchmarks, highlighting that the use of older response generators and quality aspects fail to accurately reflect modern chatbot capabilities. A small annotation experiment on a recent LLM-generated dataset (SODA) reveals that LLM evaluators such as GPT-4 struggle to detect actual deficiencies in dialogues generated by current LLM chatbots.

The adaption of multilingual pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) into eloquent and helpful assistants is essential to facilitate their use across different language regions. In that spirit, we are the first to conduct an extensive study of the performance of multilingual models on parallel, multi-turn instruction-tuning benchmarks across a selection of the most-spoken Indo-European languages. We systematically examine the effects of language and instruction dataset size on a mid-sized, multilingual LLM by instruction-tuning it on parallel instruction-tuning datasets. Our results demonstrate that instruction-tuning on parallel instead of monolingual corpora benefits cross-lingual instruction following capabilities by up to 4.6%. Furthermore, we show that the Superficial Alignment Hypothesis does not hold in general, as the investigated multilingual 7B parameter model presents a counter-example requiring large-scale instruction-tuning datasets. Finally, we conduct a human annotation study to understand the alignment between human-based and GPT-4-based evaluation within multilingual chat scenarios.

Text evaluation has historically posed significant challenges, often demanding substantial labor and time cost. With the emergence of large language models (LLMs), researchers have explored LLMs' potential as alternatives for human evaluation. While these single-agent-based approaches show promise, experimental results suggest that further advancements are needed to bridge the gap between their current effectiveness and human-level evaluation quality. Recognizing that best practices of human evaluation processes often involve multiple human annotators collaborating in the evaluation, we resort to a multi-agent debate framework, moving beyond single-agent prompting strategies. The multi-agent-based approach enables a group of LLMs to synergize with an array of intelligent counterparts, harnessing their distinct capabilities and expertise to enhance efficiency and effectiveness in handling intricate tasks. In this paper, we construct a multi-agent referee team called ChatEval to autonomously discuss and evaluate the quality of generated responses from different models on open-ended questions and traditional natural language generation (NLG) tasks. Our analysis shows that ChatEval transcends mere textual scoring, offering a human-mimicking evaluation process for reliable assessments. Our code is available at https://github.com/chanchimin/ChatEval.

Recently, the emergence of ChatGPT has attracted wide attention from the computational linguistics community. Many prior studies have shown that ChatGPT achieves remarkable performance on various NLP tasks in terms of automatic evaluation metrics. However, the ability of ChatGPT to serve as an evaluation metric is still underexplored. Considering assessing the quality of natural language generation (NLG) models is an arduous task and NLG metrics notoriously show their poor correlation with human judgments, we wonder whether ChatGPT is a good NLG evaluation metric. In this report, we provide a preliminary meta-evaluation on ChatGPT to show its reliability as an NLG metric. In detail, we regard ChatGPT as a human evaluator and give task-specific (e.g., summarization) and aspect-specific (e.g., relevance) instruction to prompt ChatGPT to evaluate the generated results of NLG models. We conduct experiments on five NLG meta-evaluation datasets (including summarization, story generation and data-to-text tasks). Experimental results show that compared with previous automatic metrics, ChatGPT achieves state-of-the-art or competitive correlation with human judgments in most cases. In addition, we find that the effectiveness of the ChatGPT evaluator might be influenced by the creation method of the meta-evaluation datasets. For the meta-evaluation datasets which are created greatly depending on the reference and thus are biased, the ChatGPT evaluator might lose its effectiveness. We hope our preliminary study could prompt the emergence of a general-purposed reliable NLG metric.

Chatbots are designed to carry out human-like conversations across different domains, such as general chit-chat, knowledge exchange, and persona-grounded conversations. To measure the quality of such conversational agents, a dialogue evaluator is expected to conduct assessment across domains as well. However, most of the state-of-the-art automatic dialogue evaluation metrics (ADMs) are not designed for multi-domain evaluation. We are motivated to design a general and robust framework, MDD-Eval, to address the problem. Specifically, we first train a teacher evaluator with human-annotated data to acquire a rating skill to tell good dialogue responses from bad ones in a particular domain and then, adopt a self-training strategy to train a new evaluator with teacher-annotated multi-domain data, that helps the new evaluator to generalize across multiple domains. MDD-Eval is extensively assessed on six dialogue evaluation benchmarks. Empirical results show that the MDD-Eval framework achieves a strong performance with an absolute improvement of 7% over the state-of-the-art ADMs in terms of mean Spearman correlation scores across all the evaluation benchmarks.

Despite tremendous advancements in dialogue systems, stable evaluation still requires human judgments producing notoriously high-variance metrics due to their inherent subjectivity. Moreover, methods and labels in dialogue evaluation are not fully standardized, especially for open-domain chats, with a lack of work to compare and assess the validity of those approaches. The use of inconsistent evaluation can misinform the performance of a dialogue system, which becomes a major hurdle to enhance it. Thus, a dimensional evaluation of chat-oriented open-domain dialogue systems that reliably measures several aspects of dialogue capabilities is desired. This paper presents a novel human evaluation method to estimate the rates of many dialogue system behaviors. Our method is used to evaluate four state-of-the-art open-domain dialogue systems and compared with existing approaches. The analysis demonstrates that our behavior method is more suitable than alternative Likert-style or comparative approaches for dimensional evaluation of these systems.

We introduce Vibe-Eval: a new open benchmark and framework for evaluating multimodal chat models. Vibe-Eval consists of 269 visual understanding prompts, including 100 of hard difficulty, complete with gold-standard responses authored by experts. Vibe-Eval is open-ended and challenging with dual objectives: (i) vibe checking multimodal chat models for day-to-day tasks and (ii) rigorously testing and probing the capabilities of present frontier models. Notably, our hard set contains >50% questions that all frontier models answer incorrectly. We explore the nuances of designing, evaluating, and ranking models on ultra challenging prompts. We also discuss trade-offs between human and automatic evaluation, and show that automatic model evaluation using Reka Core roughly correlates to human judgment. We offer free API access for the purpose of lightweight evaluation and plan to conduct formal human evaluations for public models that perform well on the Vibe-Eval's automatic scores. We release the evaluation code and data, see https://github.com/reka-ai/reka-vibe-eval

Although human evaluation remains the gold standard for open-domain dialogue evaluation, the growing popularity of automated evaluation using Large Language Models (LLMs) has also extended to dialogue. However, most frameworks leverage benchmarks that assess older chatbots on aspects such as fluency and relevance, which are not reflective of the challenges associated with contemporary models. In fact, a qualitative analysis on Soda, a GPT-3.5 generated dialogue dataset, suggests that current chatbots may exhibit several recurring issues related to coherence and commonsense knowledge, but generally produce highly fluent and relevant responses. Noting the aforementioned limitations, this paper introduces Soda-Eval, an annotated dataset based on Soda that covers over 120K turn-level assessments across 10K dialogues, where the annotations were generated by GPT-4. Using Soda-Eval as a benchmark, we then study the performance of several open-access instruction-tuned LLMs, finding that dialogue evaluation remains challenging. Fine-tuning these models improves performance over few-shot inferences, both in terms of correlation and explanation.

With ChatGPT-like large language models (LLM) prevailing in the community, how to evaluate the ability of LLMs is an open question. Existing evaluation methods suffer from following shortcomings: (1) constrained evaluation abilities, (2) vulnerable benchmarks, (3) unobjective metrics. We suggest that task-based evaluation, where LLM agents complete tasks in a simulated environment, is a one-for-all solution to solve above problems. We present AgentSims, an easy-to-use infrastructure for researchers from all disciplines to test the specific capacities they are interested in. Researchers can build their evaluation tasks by adding agents and buildings on an interactive GUI or deploy and test new support mechanisms, i.e. memory, planning and tool-use systems, by a few lines of codes. Our demo is available at https://agentsims.com .

Following the rapid progress in natural language processing (NLP) models, language models are applied to increasingly more complex interactive tasks such as negotiations and conversation moderations. Having human evaluators directly interact with these NLP models is essential for adequately evaluating the performance on such interactive tasks. We develop BotEval, an easily customizable, open-source, evaluation toolkit that focuses on enabling human-bot interactions as part of the evaluation process, as opposed to human evaluators making judgements for a static input. BotEval balances flexibility for customization and user-friendliness by providing templates for common use cases that span various degrees of complexity and built-in compatibility with popular crowdsourcing platforms. We showcase the numerous useful features of BotEval through a study that evaluates the performance of various chatbots on their effectiveness for conversational moderation and discuss how BotEval differs from other annotation tools.

We propose LLM-Eval, a unified multi-dimensional automatic evaluation method for open-domain conversations with large language models (LLMs). Existing evaluation methods often rely on human annotations, ground-truth responses, or multiple LLM prompts, which can be expensive and time-consuming. To address these issues, we design a single prompt-based evaluation method that leverages a unified evaluation schema to cover multiple dimensions of conversation quality in a single model call. We extensively evaluate the performance of LLM-Eval on various benchmark datasets, demonstrating its effectiveness, efficiency, and adaptability compared to state-of-the-art evaluation methods. Our analysis also highlights the importance of choosing suitable LLMs and decoding strategies for accurate evaluation results. LLM-Eval offers a versatile and robust solution for evaluating open-domain conversation systems, streamlining the evaluation process and providing consistent performance across diverse scenarios.

Large Language Models have found application in various mundane and repetitive tasks including Human Resource (HR) support. We worked with the domain experts of SAP SE to develop an HR support chatbot as an efficient and effective tool for addressing employee inquiries. We inserted a human-in-the-loop in various parts of the development cycles such as dataset collection, prompt optimization, and evaluation of generated output. By enhancing the LLM-driven chatbot's response quality and exploring alternative retrieval methods, we have created an efficient, scalable, and flexible tool for HR professionals to address employee inquiries effectively. Our experiments and evaluation conclude that GPT-4 outperforms other models and can overcome inconsistencies in data through internal reasoning capabilities. Additionally, through expert analysis, we infer that reference-free evaluation metrics such as G-Eval and Prometheus demonstrate reliability closely aligned with that of human evaluation.

The debut of ChatGPT has recently attracted the attention of the natural language processing (NLP) community and beyond. Existing studies have demonstrated that ChatGPT shows significant improvement in a range of downstream NLP tasks, but the capabilities and limitations of ChatGPT in terms of recommendations remain unclear. In this study, we aim to conduct an empirical analysis of ChatGPT's recommendation ability from an Information Retrieval (IR) perspective, including point-wise, pair-wise, and list-wise ranking. To achieve this goal, we re-formulate the above three recommendation policies into a domain-specific prompt format. Through extensive experiments on four datasets from different domains, we demonstrate that ChatGPT outperforms other large language models across all three ranking policies. Based on the analysis of unit cost improvements, we identify that ChatGPT with list-wise ranking achieves the best trade-off between cost and performance compared to point-wise and pair-wise ranking. Moreover, ChatGPT shows the potential for mitigating the cold start problem and explainable recommendation. To facilitate further explorations in this area, the full code and detailed original results are open-sourced at https://github.com/rainym00d/LLM4RS.

Using large language models (LLMs) to evaluate text quality has recently gained popularity. Some prior works explore the idea of using LLMs for evaluation, while they differ in some details of the evaluation process. In this paper, we analyze LLM evaluation (Chiang and Lee, 2023) and G-Eval (Liu et al., 2023), and we discuss how those details in the evaluation process change how well the ratings given by LLMs correlate with human ratings. We find that the auto Chain-of-Thought (CoT) used in G-Eval does not always make G-Eval more aligned with human ratings. We also show that forcing the LLM to output only a numeric rating, as in G-Eval, is suboptimal. Last, we reveal that asking the LLM to explain its own ratings consistently improves the correlation between the ChatGPT and human ratings and pushes state-of-the-art (SoTA) correlations on two meta-evaluation datasets.

We introduce Jais and Jais-chat, new state-of-the-art Arabic-centric foundation and instruction-tuned open generative large language models (LLMs). The models are based on the GPT-3 decoder-only architecture and are pretrained on a mixture of Arabic and English texts, including source code in various programming languages. With 13 billion parameters, they demonstrate better knowledge and reasoning capabilities in Arabic than any existing open Arabic and multilingual models by a sizable margin, based on extensive evaluation. Moreover, the models are competitive in English compared to English-centric open models of similar size, despite being trained on much less English data. We provide a detailed description of the training, the tuning, the safety alignment, and the evaluation of the models. We release two open versions of the model -- the foundation Jais model, and an instruction-tuned Jais-chat variant -- with the aim of promoting research on Arabic LLMs. Available at https://huggingface.co/inception-mbzuai/jais-13b-chat

The lack of meaningful automatic evaluation metrics for dialog has impeded open-domain dialog research. Standard language generation metrics have been shown to be ineffective for evaluating dialog models. To this end, this paper presents USR, an UnSupervised and Reference-free evaluation metric for dialog. USR is a reference-free metric that trains unsupervised models to measure several desirable qualities of dialog. USR is shown to strongly correlate with human judgment on both Topical-Chat (turn-level: 0.42, system-level: 1.0) and PersonaChat (turn-level: 0.48 and system-level: 1.0). USR additionally produces interpretable measures for several desirable properties of dialog.

Chart-to-summary generation can help explore data, communicate insights, and help the visually impaired people. Multi-modal generative models have been used to produce fluent summaries, but they can suffer from factual and perceptual errors. In this work we present CHATS-CRITIC, a reference-free chart summarization metric for scoring faithfulness. CHATS-CRITIC is composed of an image-to-text model to recover the table from a chart, and a tabular entailment model applied to score the summary sentence by sentence. We find that CHATS-CRITIC evaluates the summary quality according to human ratings better than reference-based metrics, either learned or n-gram based, and can be further used to fix candidate summaries by removing not supported sentences. We then introduce CHATS-PI, a chart-to-summary pipeline that leverages CHATS-CRITIC during inference to fix and rank sampled candidates from any chart-summarization model. We evaluate CHATS-PI and CHATS-CRITIC using human raters, establishing state-of-the-art results on two popular chart-to-summary datasets.

Recent popularity surrounds large AI language models due to their impressive natural language capabilities. They contribute significantly to language-related tasks, including prompt-based learning, making them valuable for various specific tasks. This approach unlocks their full potential, enhancing precision and generalization. Research communities are actively exploring their applications, with ChatGPT receiving recognition. Despite extensive research on large language models, their potential in recommendation scenarios still needs to be explored. This study aims to fill this gap by investigating ChatGPT's capabilities as a zero-shot recommender system. Our goals include evaluating its ability to use user preferences for recommendations, reordering existing recommendation lists, leveraging information from similar users, and handling cold-start situations. We assess ChatGPT's performance through comprehensive experiments using three datasets (MovieLens Small, Last.FM, and Facebook Book). We compare ChatGPT's performance against standard recommendation algorithms and other large language models, such as GPT-3.5 and PaLM-2. To measure recommendation effectiveness, we employ widely-used evaluation metrics like Mean Average Precision (MAP), Recall, Precision, F1, normalized Discounted Cumulative Gain (nDCG), Item Coverage, Expected Popularity Complement (EPC), Average Coverage of Long Tail (ACLT), Average Recommendation Popularity (ARP), and Popularity-based Ranking-based Equal Opportunity (PopREO). Through thoroughly exploring ChatGPT's abilities in recommender systems, our study aims to contribute to the growing body of research on the versatility and potential applications of large language models. Our experiment code is available on the GitHub repository: https://github.com/sisinflab/Recommender-ChatGPT

While dialogue remains an important end-goal of natural language research, the difficulty of evaluation is an oft-quoted reason why it remains troublesome to make real progress towards its solution. Evaluation difficulties are actually two-fold: not only do automatic metrics not correlate well with human judgments, but also human judgments themselves are in fact difficult to measure. The two most used human judgment tests, single-turn pairwise evaluation and multi-turn Likert scores, both have serious flaws as we discuss in this work. We instead provide a novel procedure involving comparing two full dialogues, where a human judge is asked to pay attention to only one speaker within each, and make a pairwise judgment. The questions themselves are optimized to maximize the robustness of judgments across different annotators, resulting in better tests. We also show how these tests work in self-play model chat setups, resulting in faster, cheaper tests. We hope these tests become the de facto standard, and will release open-source code to that end.

Automatic evaluation is an integral aspect of dialogue system research. The traditional reference-based NLG metrics are generally found to be unsuitable for dialogue assessment. Consequently, recent studies have suggested various unique, reference-free neural metrics that better align with human evaluations. Notably among them, large language models (LLMs), particularly the instruction-tuned variants like ChatGPT, are shown to be promising substitutes for human judges. Yet, existing works on utilizing LLMs for automatic dialogue evaluation are limited in their scope in terms of the number of meta-evaluation datasets, mode of evaluation, coverage of LLMs, etc. Hence, it remains inconclusive how effective these LLMs are. To this end, we conduct a comprehensive study on the application of LLMs for automatic dialogue evaluation. Specifically, we analyze the multi-dimensional evaluation capability of 30 recently emerged LLMs at both turn and dialogue levels, using a comprehensive set of 12 meta-evaluation datasets. Additionally, we probe the robustness of the LLMs in handling various adversarial perturbations at both turn and dialogue levels. Finally, we explore how model-level and dimension-level ensembles impact the evaluation performance. All resources are available at https://github.com/e0397123/comp-analysis.

There is a multitude of novel generative models for open-domain conversational systems; however, there is no systematic evaluation of different systems. Systematic comparisons require consistency in experimental design, evaluation sets, conversational systems and their outputs, and statistical analysis. We lay out a protocol for the evaluation of conversational models using head-to-head pairwise comparison. We analyze ten recent models that claim state-of-the-art performance using a paired head-to-head performance (win-loss-tie) on five evaluation datasets. Our findings show that DialoGPT and Blender are superior systems using Bradley-Terry model and TrueSkill ranking methods. These findings demonstrate the feasibility of our protocol to evaluate conversational agents and evaluation sets. Finally, we make all code and evaluations publicly available for researchers to compare their model to other state-of-the-art dialog models.

While there are abundant researches about evaluating ChatGPT on natural language understanding and generation tasks, few studies have investigated how ChatGPT's behavior changes over time. In this paper, we collect a coarse-to-fine temporal dataset called ChatLog, consisting of two parts that update monthly and daily: ChatLog-Monthly is a dataset of 38,730 question-answer pairs collected every month including questions from both the reasoning and classification tasks. ChatLog-Daily, on the other hand, consists of ChatGPT's responses to 1000 identical questions for long-form generation every day. We conduct comprehensive automatic and human evaluation to provide the evidence for the existence of ChatGPT evolving patterns. We further analyze the unchanged characteristics of ChatGPT over time by extracting its knowledge and linguistic features. We find some stable features to improve the robustness of a RoBERTa-based detector on new versions of ChatGPT. We will continuously maintain our project at https://github.com/THU-KEG/ChatLog.

Evaluating the quality of generated text is a challenging task in NLP, due to the inherent complexity and diversity of text. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have garnered significant attention due to their impressive performance in various tasks. Therefore, we present this paper to investigate the effectiveness of LLMs, especially ChatGPT, and explore ways to optimize their use in assessing text quality. We compared three kinds of reference-free evaluation methods. The experimental results prove that ChatGPT is capable of evaluating text quality effectively from various perspectives without reference and demonstrates superior performance than most existing automatic metrics. In particular, the Explicit Score, which utilizes ChatGPT to generate a numeric score measuring text quality, is the most effective and reliable method among the three exploited approaches. However, directly comparing the quality of two texts may lead to suboptimal results. We believe this paper will provide valuable insights for evaluating text quality with LLMs and have released the used data.

When asked, current large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT claim that they can assist us with relevance judgments. Many researchers think this would not lead to credible IR research. In this perspective paper, we discuss possible ways for LLMs to assist human experts along with concerns and issues that arise. We devise a human-machine collaboration spectrum that allows categorizing different relevance judgment strategies, based on how much the human relies on the machine. For the extreme point of "fully automated assessment", we further include a pilot experiment on whether LLM-based relevance judgments correlate with judgments from trained human assessors. We conclude the paper by providing two opposing perspectives - for and against the use of LLMs for automatic relevance judgments - and a compromise perspective, informed by our analyses of the literature, our preliminary experimental evidence, and our experience as IR researchers. We hope to start a constructive discussion within the community to avoid a stale-mate during review, where work is dammed if is uses LLMs for evaluation and dammed if it doesn't.

Evaluating the quality of a dialogue interaction between two agents is a difficult task, especially in open-domain chit-chat style dialogue. There have been recent efforts to develop automatic dialogue evaluation metrics, but most of them do not generalize to unseen datasets and/or need a human-generated reference response during inference, making it infeasible for online evaluation. Here, we propose an unreferenced automated evaluation metric that uses large pre-trained language models to extract latent representations of utterances, and leverages the temporal transitions that exist between them. We show that our model achieves higher correlation with human annotations in an online setting, while not requiring true responses for comparison during inference.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated their significant potential to be applied for addressing various application tasks. However, traditional recommender systems continue to face great challenges such as poor interactivity and explainability, which actually also hinder their broad deployment in real-world systems. To address these limitations, this paper proposes a novel paradigm called Chat-Rec (ChatGPT Augmented Recommender System) that innovatively augments LLMs for building conversational recommender systems by converting user profiles and historical interactions into prompts. Chat-Rec is demonstrated to be effective in learning user preferences and establishing connections between users and products through in-context learning, which also makes the recommendation process more interactive and explainable. What's more, within the Chat-Rec framework, user's preferences can transfer to different products for cross-domain recommendations, and prompt-based injection of information into LLMs can also handle the cold-start scenarios with new items. In our experiments, Chat-Rec effectively improve the results of top-k recommendations and performs better in zero-shot rating prediction task. Chat-Rec offers a novel approach to improving recommender systems and presents new practical scenarios for the implementation of AIGC (AI generated content) in recommender system studies.

While rich, open-domain textual data are generally available and may include interesting phenomena (humor, sarcasm, empathy, etc.) most are designed for language processing tasks, and are usually in a non-conversational format. In this work, we take a step towards automatically generating conversational data using Generative Conversational Networks, aiming to benefit from the breadth of available language and knowledge data, and train open domain social conversational agents. We evaluate our approach on conversations with and without knowledge on the Topical Chat dataset using automatic metrics and human evaluators. Our results show that for conversations without knowledge grounding, GCN can generalize from the seed data, producing novel conversations that are less relevant but more engaging and for knowledge-grounded conversations, it can produce more knowledge-focused, fluent, and engaging conversations. Specifically, we show that for open-domain conversations with 10\% of seed data, our approach performs close to the baseline that uses 100% of the data, while for knowledge-grounded conversations, it achieves the same using only 1% of the data, on human ratings of engagingness, fluency, and relevance.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have unlocked new capabilities and applications; however, evaluating the alignment with human preferences still poses significant challenges. To address this issue, we introduce Chatbot Arena, an open platform for evaluating LLMs based on human preferences. Our methodology employs a pairwise comparison approach and leverages input from a diverse user base through crowdsourcing. The platform has been operational for several months, amassing over 240K votes. This paper describes the platform, analyzes the data we have collected so far, and explains the tried-and-true statistical methods we are using for efficient and accurate evaluation and ranking of models. We confirm that the crowdsourced questions are sufficiently diverse and discriminating and that the crowdsourced human votes are in good agreement with those of expert raters. These analyses collectively establish a robust foundation for the credibility of Chatbot Arena. Because of its unique value and openness, Chatbot Arena has emerged as one of the most referenced LLM leaderboards, widely cited by leading LLM developers and companies. Our demo is publicly available at https://chat.lmsys.org.

Interacting with human via high-quality multi-turn dialogues is a key feature of large language models (LLMs). However, human-based evaluation of such capability involves intensive manual labor. This report provides a preliminary evaluation of existing large language models for human-style multi-turn chatting, through an LLM-based approach. We start from real-world human dialogues and keep the very first utterances as the ChatSEED. Then we prompt LLMs to generate a full multi-turn dialogue (tens of utterances) based on the ChatSEED, utterance by utterance. Finally, we adopt state-of-the-art LLMs (GPT-4, \etc) as the judge to evaluate the generated dialogues. With different evaluation protocols, we come to substantially identical conclusions. We find that GPT-4 can generate human-style multi-turn dialogues with impressive quality, significantly outperforms its counterparts. It's difficult for a discriminator to distinguish between GPT-4 generated dialogues and human dialogues. In contrast, other LLMs struggle to generate multi-turn dialogues of satisfactory quality due to poor instruction-following capability, tendency to generate lengthy utterances, or limited general capability. All data and codes will be provided in https://github.com/open-compass/BotChat/ and we hope they can serve as a valuable resource for evaluating multi-turn chatting capabilities of LLMs.

While large language models excel at following explicit instructions, they often struggle with ambiguous or incomplete user requests, defaulting to verbose, generic responses rather than seeking clarification. We introduce InfoQuest, a multi-turn chat benchmark designed to evaluate how dialogue agents handle hidden context in open-ended user requests. The benchmark presents intentionally ambiguous scenarios that require models to engage in information-seeking dialogue through clarifying questions before providing appropriate responses. Our evaluation of both open and closed-source models reveals that while proprietary models generally perform better, all current assistants struggle with effectively gathering critical information, often requiring multiple turns to infer user intent and frequently defaulting to generic responses without proper clarification. We provide a systematic methodology for generating diverse scenarios and evaluating models' information-seeking capabilities, offering insights into the current limitations of language models in handling ambiguous requests through multi-turn interactions.

Recently, ChatGPT has drawn great attention from both the research community and the public. We are particularly curious about whether it can serve as a universal sentiment analyzer. To this end, in this work, we provide a preliminary evaluation of ChatGPT on the understanding of opinions, sentiments, and emotions contained in the text. Specifically, we evaluate it in four settings, including standard evaluation, polarity shift evaluation, open-domain evaluation, and sentiment inference evaluation. The above evaluation involves 18 benchmark datasets and 5 representative sentiment analysis tasks, and we compare ChatGPT with fine-tuned BERT and corresponding state-of-the-art (SOTA) models on end-task. Moreover, we also conduct human evaluation and present some qualitative case studies to gain a deep comprehension of its sentiment analysis capabilities.

Dialogue-based language models mark a huge milestone in the field of artificial intelligence, by their impressive ability to interact with users, as well as a series of challenging tasks prompted by customized instructions. However, the prevalent large-scale dialogue-based language models like ChatGPT still have room for improvement, such as unstable responses to questions and the inability to think cooperatively like humans. Considering the ability of dialogue-based language models in conversation and their inherent randomness in thinking, we propose ChatLLM network that allows multiple dialogue-based language models to interact, provide feedback, and think together. We design the network of ChatLLMs based on ChatGPT. Specifically, individual instances of ChatGPT may possess distinct perspectives towards the same problem, and by consolidating these diverse viewpoints via a separate ChatGPT, the ChatLLM network system can conduct decision-making more objectively and comprehensively. In addition, a language-based feedback mechanism comparable to backpropagation is devised to update the ChatGPTs within the network. Experiments on two datasets demonstrate that our network attains significant improvements in problem-solving, leading to observable progress amongst each member.

Recently, significant public efforts have been directed towards developing low-cost models with capabilities akin to ChatGPT, thereby fostering the growth of open-source conversational models. However, there remains a scarcity of comprehensive and in-depth evaluations of these models' performance. In this study, we examine the influence of training data factors, including quantity, quality, and linguistic distribution, on model performance. Our analysis is grounded in several publicly accessible, high-quality instruction datasets, as well as our own Chinese multi-turn conversations. We assess various models using a evaluation set of 1,000 samples, encompassing nine real-world scenarios. Our goal is to supplement manual evaluations with quantitative analyses, offering valuable insights for the continued advancement of open-source chat models. Furthermore, to enhance the performance and training and inference efficiency of models in the Chinese domain, we extend the vocabulary of LLaMA - the model with the closest open-source performance to proprietary language models like GPT-3 - and conduct secondary pre-training on 3.4B Chinese words. We make our model, data, as well as code publicly available.

This paper proposes a framework for quantitatively evaluating interactive LLMs such as ChatGPT using publicly available data sets. We carry out an extensive technical evaluation of ChatGPT using 23 data sets covering 8 different common NLP application tasks. We evaluate the multitask, multilingual and multi-modal aspects of ChatGPT based on these data sets and a newly designed multimodal dataset. We find that ChatGPT outperforms LLMs with zero-shot learning on most tasks and even outperforms fine-tuned models on some tasks. We find that it is better at understanding non-Latin script languages than generating them. It is able to generate multimodal content from textual prompts, via an intermediate code generation step. Moreover, we find that ChatGPT is 63.41% accurate on average in 10 different reasoning categories under logical reasoning, non-textual reasoning, and commonsense reasoning, hence making it an unreliable reasoner. It is, for example, better at deductive than inductive reasoning. ChatGPT suffers from hallucination problems like other LLMs and it generates more extrinsic hallucinations from its parametric memory as it does not have access to an external knowledge base. Finally, the interactive feature of ChatGPT enables human collaboration with the underlying LLM to improve its performance, i.e, 8% ROUGE-1 on summarization and 2% ChrF++ on machine translation, in a multi-turn "prompt engineering" fashion. We also release codebase for evaluation set extraction.

This paper describes the systems submitted by team6 for ChatEval, the DSTC 11 Track 4 competition. We present three different approaches to predicting turn-level qualities of chatbot responses based on large language models (LLMs). We report improvement over the baseline using dynamic few-shot examples from a vector store for the prompts for ChatGPT. We also analyze the performance of the other two approaches and report needed improvements for future work. We developed the three systems over just two weeks, showing the potential of LLMs for this task. An ablation study conducted after the challenge deadline shows that the new Llama 2 models are closing the performance gap between ChatGPT and open-source LLMs. However, we find that the Llama 2 models do not benefit from few-shot examples in the same way as ChatGPT.

By organizing knowledge within a research field, Systematic Reviews (SR) provide valuable leads to steer research. Evidence suggests that SRs have become first-class artifacts in software engineering. However, the tedious manual effort associated with the screening phase of SRs renders these studies a costly and error-prone endeavor. While screening has traditionally been considered not amenable to automation, the advent of generative AI-driven chatbots, backed with large language models is set to disrupt the field. In this report, we propose an approach to leverage these novel technological developments for automating the screening of SRs. We assess the consistency, classification performance, and generalizability of ChatGPT in screening articles for SRs and compare these figures with those of traditional classifiers used in SR automation. Our results indicate that ChatGPT is a viable option to automate the SR processes, but requires careful considerations from developers when integrating ChatGPT into their SR tools.

Evaluating the quality of a dialogue system is an understudied problem. The recent evolution of evaluation method motivated this survey, in which an explicit and comprehensive analysis of the existing methods is sought. We are first to divide the evaluation methods into three classes, i.e., automatic evaluation, human-involved evaluation and user simulator based evaluation. Then, each class is covered with main features and the related evaluation metrics. The existence of benchmarks, suitable for the evaluation of dialogue techniques are also discussed in detail. Finally, some open issues are pointed out to bring the evaluation method into a new frontier.

Conversational recommender systems (CRS) generate recommendations through an interactive process. However, not all CRS approaches use human conversations as their source of interaction data; the majority of prior CRS work simulates interactions by exchanging entity-level information. As a result, claims of prior CRS work do not generalise to real-world settings where conversations take unexpected turns, or where conversational and intent understanding is not perfect. To tackle this challenge, the research community has started to examine holistic CRS, which are trained using conversational data collected from real-world scenarios. Despite their emergence, such holistic approaches are under-explored. We present a comprehensive survey of holistic CRS methods by summarizing the literature in a structured manner. Our survey recognises holistic CRS approaches as having three components: 1) a backbone language model, the optional use of 2) external knowledge, and/or 3) external guidance. We also give a detailed analysis of CRS datasets and evaluation methods in real application scenarios. We offer our insight as to the current challenges of holistic CRS and possible future trends.

Recommender systems are software applications that help users to find items of interest in situations of information overload. Current research often assumes a one-shot interaction paradigm, where the users' preferences are estimated based on past observed behavior and where the presentation of a ranked list of suggestions is the main, one-directional form of user interaction. Conversational recommender systems (CRS) take a different approach and support a richer set of interactions. These interactions can, for example, help to improve the preference elicitation process or allow the user to ask questions about the recommendations and to give feedback. The interest in CRS has significantly increased in the past few years. This development is mainly due to the significant progress in the area of natural language processing, the emergence of new voice-controlled home assistants, and the increased use of chatbot technology. With this paper, we provide a detailed survey of existing approaches to conversational recommendation. We categorize these approaches in various dimensions, e.g., in terms of the supported user intents or the knowledge they use in the background. Moreover, we discuss technological approaches, review how CRS are evaluated, and finally identify a number of gaps that deserve more research in the future.

The development of Open-Domain Dialogue Systems (ODS)is a trending topic due to the large number of research challenges, large societal and business impact, and advances in the underlying technology. However, the development of these kinds of systems requires two important characteristics:1) automatic evaluation mechanisms that show high correlations with human judgements across multiple dialogue evaluation aspects (with explainable features for providing constructive and explicit feedback on the quality of generative models' responses for quick development and deployment)and 2) mechanisms that can help to control chatbot responses,while avoiding toxicity and employing intelligent ways to handle toxic user comments and keeping interaction flow and engagement. This track at the 10th Dialogue System Technology Challenge (DSTC10) is part of the ongoing effort to promote scalable and toxic-free ODS. This paper describes the datasets and baselines provided to participants, as well as submission evaluation results for each of the two proposed subtasks.

This paper presents ChatCounselor, a large language model (LLM) solution designed to provide mental health support. Unlike generic chatbots, ChatCounselor is distinguished by its foundation in real conversations between consulting clients and professional psychologists, enabling it to possess specialized knowledge and counseling skills in the field of psychology. The training dataset, Psych8k, was constructed from 260 in-depth interviews, each spanning an hour. To assess the quality of counseling responses, the counseling Bench was devised. Leveraging GPT-4 and meticulously crafted prompts based on seven metrics of psychological counseling assessment, the model underwent evaluation using a set of real-world counseling questions. Impressively, ChatCounselor surpasses existing open-source models in the counseling Bench and approaches the performance level of ChatGPT, showcasing the remarkable enhancement in model capability attained through high-quality domain-specific data.

This research aims to explore various methods for assessing user feedback in mixed-initiative conversational search (CS) systems. While CS systems enjoy profuse advancements across multiple aspects, recent research fails to successfully incorporate feedback from the users. One of the main reasons for that is the lack of system-user conversational interaction data. To this end, we propose a user simulator-based framework for multi-turn interactions with a variety of mixed-initiative CS systems. Specifically, we develop a user simulator, dubbed ConvSim, that, once initialized with an information need description, is capable of providing feedback to a system's responses, as well as answering potential clarifying questions. Our experiments on a wide variety of state-of-the-art passage retrieval and neural re-ranking models show that effective utilization of user feedback can lead to 16% retrieval performance increase in terms of nDCG@3. Moreover, we observe consistent improvements as the number of feedback rounds increases (35% relative improvement in terms of nDCG@3 after three rounds). This points to a research gap in the development of specific feedback processing modules and opens a potential for significant advancements in CS. To support further research in the topic, we release over 30,000 transcripts of system-simulator interactions based on well-established CS datasets.

Conversational search requires accurate interpretation of user intent from complex multi-turn contexts. This paper presents ChatRetriever, which inherits the strong generalization capability of large language models to robustly represent complex conversational sessions for dense retrieval. To achieve this, we propose a simple and effective dual-learning approach that adapts LLM for retrieval via contrastive learning while enhancing the complex session understanding through masked instruction tuning on high-quality conversational instruction tuning data. Extensive experiments on five conversational search benchmarks demonstrate that ChatRetriever substantially outperforms existing conversational dense retrievers, achieving state-of-the-art performance on par with LLM-based rewriting approaches. Furthermore, ChatRetriever exhibits superior robustness in handling diverse conversational contexts. Our work highlights the potential of adapting LLMs for retrieval with complex inputs like conversational search sessions and proposes an effective approach to advance this research direction.

This study introduces a novel approach for generating high-quality, language-specific chat corpora using a self-chat mechanism. We combine a generator LLM for creating new samples and an embedder LLM to ensure diversity. A new Masked Language Modelling (MLM) model-based quality assessment metric is proposed for evaluating and filtering the corpora. Utilizing the llama2-70b as the generator and a multilingual sentence transformer as embedder, we generate an Italian chat corpus and refine the Fauno corpus, which is based on translated English ChatGPT self-chat data. The refinement uses structural assertions and Natural Language Processing techniques. Both corpora undergo a comprehensive quality evaluation using the proposed MLM model-based quality metric. The Italian LLM fine-tuned with these corpora demonstrates significantly enhanced language comprehension and question-answering skills. The resultant model, cerbero-7b, establishes a new state-of-the-art for Italian LLMs. This approach marks a substantial advancement in the development of language-specific LLMs, with a special emphasis on augmenting corpora for underrepresented languages like Italian.

The emergence of pretrained large language models has led to the deployment of a range of social chatbots for chitchat. Although these chatbots demonstrate language ability and fluency, they are not guaranteed to be engaging and can struggle to retain users. This work investigates the development of social chatbots that prioritize user engagement to enhance retention, specifically examining the use of human feedback to efficiently develop highly engaging chatbots. The proposed approach uses automatic pseudo-labels collected from user interactions to train a reward model that can be used to reject low-scoring sample responses generated by the chatbot model at inference time. Intuitive evaluation metrics, such as mean conversation length (MCL), are introduced as proxies to measure the level of engagement of deployed chatbots. A/B testing on groups of 10,000 new daily chatbot users on the Chai Research platform shows that this approach increases the MCL by up to 70%, which translates to a more than 30% increase in user retention for a GPT-J 6B model. Future work aims to use the reward model to realise a data fly-wheel, where the latest user conversations can be used to alternately fine-tune the language model and the reward model.

The increasing availability of real-world conversation data offers exciting opportunities for researchers to study user-chatbot interactions. However, the sheer volume of this data makes manually examining individual conversations impractical. To overcome this challenge, we introduce WildVis, an interactive tool that enables fast, versatile, and large-scale conversation analysis. WildVis provides search and visualization capabilities in the text and embedding spaces based on a list of criteria. To manage million-scale datasets, we implemented optimizations including search index construction, embedding precomputation and compression, and caching to ensure responsive user interactions within seconds. We demonstrate WildVis's utility through three case studies: facilitating chatbot misuse research, visualizing and comparing topic distributions across datasets, and characterizing user-specific conversation patterns. WildVis is open-source and designed to be extendable, supporting additional datasets and customized search and visualization functionalities.

An ideal model evaluation should achieve two goals: identifying where the model fails and providing actionable improvement guidance. Toward these goals for Language Model (LM) evaluations, we formulate the problem of generating a weakness profile, a set of weaknesses expressed in natural language, given an LM's performance on every individual instance in a benchmark. We introduce a suite of quantitative assessments to compare different weakness profiling methods. We also propose a weakness profiling method EvalTree. It constructs a capability tree where each node represents a capability described in natural language and is linked to a subset of benchmark instances that specifically evaluate this capability; it then extracts nodes where the LM performs poorly to generate a weakness profile. On the MATH and WildChat benchmarks, we show that EvalTree outperforms baseline weakness profiling methods by identifying weaknesses more precisely and comprehensively. Weakness profiling further enables weakness-guided data collection, and training data collection guided by EvalTree-identified weaknesses improves LM performance more than other data collection strategies. We also show how EvalTree exposes flaws in Chatbot Arena's human-voter-based evaluation practice. To facilitate future work, we release our code and an interface that allows practitioners to interactively explore the capability trees built by EvalTree.

This study presents an innovative enhancement to retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems by seamlessly integrating fine-tuned large language models (LLMs) with vector databases. This integration capitalizes on the combined strengths of structured data retrieval and the nuanced comprehension provided by advanced LLMs. Central to our approach are the LoRA and QLoRA methodologies, which stand at the forefront of model refinement through parameter-efficient fine-tuning and memory optimization. A novel feature of our research is the incorporation of user feedback directly into the training process, ensuring the model's continuous adaptation to user expectations and thus, improving its performance and applicability. Additionally, we introduce a Quantized Influence Measure (QIM) as an innovative "AI Judge" mechanism to enhance the precision of result selection, further refining the system's accuracy. Accompanied by an executive diagram and a detailed algorithm for fine-tuning QLoRA, our work provides a comprehensive framework for implementing these advancements within chatbot technologies. This research contributes significant insights into LLM optimization for specific uses and heralds new directions for further development in retrieval-augmented models. Through extensive experimentation and analysis, our findings lay a robust foundation for future advancements in chatbot technology and retrieval systems, marking a significant step forward in the creation of more sophisticated, precise, and user-centric conversational AI systems.

We present DIALIGHT, a toolkit for developing and evaluating multilingual Task-Oriented Dialogue (ToD) systems which facilitates systematic evaluations and comparisons between ToD systems using fine-tuning of Pretrained Language Models (PLMs) and those utilising the zero-shot and in-context learning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). In addition to automatic evaluation, this toolkit features (i) a secure, user-friendly web interface for fine-grained human evaluation at both local utterance level and global dialogue level, and (ii) a microservice-based backend, improving efficiency and scalability. Our evaluations reveal that while PLM fine-tuning leads to higher accuracy and coherence, LLM-based systems excel in producing diverse and likeable responses. However, we also identify significant challenges of LLMs in adherence to task-specific instructions and generating outputs in multiple languages, highlighting areas for future research. We hope this open-sourced toolkit will serve as a valuable resource for researchers aiming to develop and properly evaluate multilingual ToD systems and will lower, currently still high, entry barriers in the field.

Speech encompasses a wealth of information, including but not limited to content, paralinguistic, and environmental information. This comprehensive nature of speech significantly impacts communication and is crucial for human-computer interaction. Chat-Oriented Large Language Models (LLMs), known for their general-purpose assistance capabilities, have evolved to handle multi-modal inputs, including speech. Although these models can be adept at recognizing and analyzing speech, they often fall short of generating appropriate responses. We argue that this is due to the lack of principles on task definition and model development, which requires open-source datasets and metrics suitable for model evaluation. To bridge the gap, we present SD-Eval, a benchmark dataset aimed at multidimensional evaluation of spoken dialogue understanding and generation. SD-Eval focuses on paralinguistic and environmental information and includes 7,303 utterances, amounting to 8.76 hours of speech data. The data is aggregated from eight public datasets, representing four perspectives: emotion, accent, age, and background sound. To assess the SD-Eval benchmark dataset, we implement three different models and construct a training set following a similar process as SD-Eval. The training set contains 1,052.72 hours of speech data and 724.4k utterances. We also conduct a comprehensive evaluation using objective evaluation methods (e.g. BLEU and ROUGE), subjective evaluations and LLM-based metrics for the generated responses. Models conditioned with paralinguistic and environmental information outperform their counterparts in both objective and subjective measures. Moreover, experiments demonstrate LLM-based metrics show a higher correlation with human evaluation compared to traditional metrics. We open-source SD-Eval at https://github.com/amphionspace/SD-Eval.

The introduction of ChatGPT has garnered widespread attention in both academic and industrial communities. ChatGPT is able to respond effectively to a wide range of human questions, providing fluent and comprehensive answers that significantly surpass previous public chatbots in terms of security and usefulness. On one hand, people are curious about how ChatGPT is able to achieve such strength and how far it is from human experts. On the other hand, people are starting to worry about the potential negative impacts that large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT could have on society, such as fake news, plagiarism, and social security issues. In this work, we collected tens of thousands of comparison responses from both human experts and ChatGPT, with questions ranging from open-domain, financial, medical, legal, and psychological areas. We call the collected dataset the Human ChatGPT Comparison Corpus (HC3). Based on the HC3 dataset, we study the characteristics of ChatGPT's responses, the differences and gaps from human experts, and future directions for LLMs. We conducted comprehensive human evaluations and linguistic analyses of ChatGPT-generated content compared with that of humans, where many interesting results are revealed. After that, we conduct extensive experiments on how to effectively detect whether a certain text is generated by ChatGPT or humans. We build three different detection systems, explore several key factors that influence their effectiveness, and evaluate them in different scenarios. The dataset, code, and models are all publicly available at https://github.com/Hello-SimpleAI/chatgpt-comparison-detection.

This paper presents the first few-shot LLM-based chatbot that almost never hallucinates and has high conversationality and low latency. WikiChat is grounded on the English Wikipedia, the largest curated free-text corpus. WikiChat generates a response from an LLM, retains only the grounded facts, and combines them with additional information it retrieves from the corpus to form factual and engaging responses. We distill WikiChat based on GPT-4 into a 7B-parameter LLaMA model with minimal loss of quality, to significantly improve its latency, cost and privacy, and facilitate research and deployment. Using a novel hybrid human-and-LLM evaluation methodology, we show that our best system achieves 97.3% factual accuracy in simulated conversations. It significantly outperforms all retrieval-based and LLM-based baselines, and by 3.9%, 38.6% and 51.0% on head, tail and recent knowledge compared to GPT-4. Compared to previous state-of-the-art retrieval-based chatbots, WikiChat is also significantly more informative and engaging, just like an LLM. WikiChat achieves 97.9% factual accuracy in conversations with human users about recent topics, 55.0% better than GPT-4, while receiving significantly higher user ratings and more favorable comments.

With the emergence of generative conversational large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, serving as virtual assistants in various fields, the stability and reliability of their responses have become crucial. However, during usage, it has been observed that these models tend to waver in their judgements when confronted with follow-up questions from users expressing skepticism or disagreement. In this work, we draw inspiration from questioning strategies in education and propose a Follow-up Questioning Mechanism along with two evaluation metrics to assess the judgement consistency of LLMs before and after exposure to disturbances. We evaluate the judgement consistency of ChatGPT, PaLM2-Bison, and Vicuna-13B under this mechanism across eight reasoning benchmarks. Empirical results show that even when the initial answers are correct, judgement consistency sharply decreases when LLMs face disturbances such as questioning, negation, or misleading. Additionally, we study these models' judgement consistency under various settings (sampling temperature and prompts) to validate this issue further, observing the impact of prompt tone and conducting an in-depth error analysis for deeper behavioral insights. Furthermore, we also explore several prompting methods to mitigate this issue and demonstrate their effectiveness\url{https://github.com/NUSTM/LLMs-Waver-In-Judgements}.

The landscape for building conversational interfaces (chatbots) has witnessed a paradigm shift with recent developments in generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) based Large Language Models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT by OpenAI (GPT3.5 and GPT4), Google's Bard, Large Language Model Meta AI (LLaMA), among others. In this paper, we analyze capabilities and limitations of incorporating such models in conversational interfaces for the telecommunication domain, specifically for enterprise wireless products and services. Using Cradlepoint's publicly available data for our experiments, we present a comparative analysis of the responses from such models for multiple use-cases including domain adaptation for terminology and product taxonomy, context continuity, robustness to input perturbations and errors. We believe this evaluation would provide useful insights to data scientists engaged in building customized conversational interfaces for domain-specific requirements.

This study compares the performance of AI-generated and human-written product descriptions using a multifaceted evaluation model. We analyze descriptions for 100 products generated by four AI models (Gemma 2B, LLAMA, GPT2, and ChatGPT 4) with and without sample descriptions, against human-written descriptions. Our evaluation metrics include sentiment, readability, persuasiveness, Search Engine Optimization(SEO), clarity, emotional appeal, and call-to-action effectiveness. The results indicate that ChatGPT 4 performs the best. In contrast, other models demonstrate significant shortcomings, producing incoherent and illogical output that lacks logical structure and contextual relevance. These models struggle to maintain focus on the product being described, resulting in disjointed sentences that do not convey meaningful information. This research provides insights into the current capabilities and limitations of AI in the creation of content for e-Commerce.

This paper presents the development of a specialized chatbot for materials science, leveraging the Llama-2 language model, and continuing pre-training on the expansive research articles in the materials science domain from the S2ORC dataset. The methodology involves an initial pretraining phase on over one million domain-specific papers, followed by an instruction-tuning process to refine the chatbot's capabilities. The chatbot is designed to assist researchers, educators, and students by providing instant, context-aware responses to queries in the field of materials science. We make the four trained checkpoints (7B, 13B, with or without chat ability) freely available to the research community at https://github.com/Xianjun-Yang/Quokka.

There is a growing interest in developing goal-oriented dialog systems which serve users in accomplishing complex tasks through multi-turn conversations. Although many methods are devised to evaluate and improve the performance of individual dialog components, there is a lack of comprehensive empirical study on how different components contribute to the overall performance of a dialog system. In this paper, we perform a system-wise evaluation and present an empirical analysis on different types of dialog systems which are composed of different modules in different settings. Our results show that (1) a pipeline dialog system trained using fine-grained supervision signals at different component levels often obtains better performance than the systems that use joint or end-to-end models trained on coarse-grained labels, (2) component-wise, single-turn evaluation results are not always consistent with the overall performance of a dialog system, and (3) despite the discrepancy between simulators and human users, simulated evaluation is still a valid alternative to the costly human evaluation especially in the early stage of development.

With the advancements in conversational AI, such as ChatGPT, this paper focuses on exploring developing Large Language Models (LLMs) for non-English languages, especially emphasizing alignment with human preferences. We introduce a computationally efficient method, leveraging chat vector, to synergize pre-existing knowledge and behaviors in LLMs, restructuring the conventional training paradigm from continual pre-train -> SFT -> RLHF to continual pre-train + chat vector. Our empirical studies, primarily focused on Traditional Chinese, employ LLaMA2 as the base model and acquire the chat vector by subtracting the pre-trained weights, LLaMA2, from the weights of LLaMA2-chat. Evaluating from three distinct facets, which are toxicity, ability of instruction following, and multi-turn dialogue demonstrates the chat vector's superior efficacy in chatting. To confirm the adaptability of our approach, we extend our experiments to include models pre-trained in both Korean and Simplified Chinese, illustrating the versatility of our methodology. Overall, we present a significant solution in aligning LLMs with human preferences efficiently across various languages, accomplished by the chat vector.

Conversational recommendation systems (CRS) aim to recommend suitable items to users through natural language conversation. However, most CRS approaches do not effectively utilize the signal provided by these conversations. They rely heavily on explicit external knowledge e.g., knowledge graphs to augment the models' understanding of the items and attributes, which is quite hard to scale. To alleviate this, we propose an alternative information retrieval (IR)-styled approach to the CRS item recommendation task, where we represent conversations as queries and items as documents to be retrieved. We expand the document representation used for retrieval with conversations from the training set. With a simple BM25-based retriever, we show that our task formulation compares favorably with much more complex baselines using complex external knowledge on a popular CRS benchmark. We demonstrate further improvements using user-centric modeling and data augmentation to counter the cold start problem for CRSs.

Evaluating large language model (LLM) based chat assistants is challenging due to their broad capabilities and the inadequacy of existing benchmarks in measuring human preferences. To address this, we explore using strong LLMs as judges to evaluate these models on more open-ended questions. We examine the usage and limitations of LLM-as-a-judge, such as position and verbosity biases and limited reasoning ability, and propose solutions to migrate some of them. We then verify the agreement between LLM judges and human preferences by introducing two benchmarks: MT-bench, a multi-turn question set; and Chatbot Arena, a crowdsourced battle platform. Our results reveal that strong LLM judges like GPT-4 can match both controlled and crowdsourced human preferences well, achieving over 80\% agreement, the same level of agreement between humans. Hence, LLM-as-a-judge is a scalable and explainable way to approximate human preferences, which are otherwise very expensive to obtain. Additionally, we show our benchmark and traditional benchmarks complement each other by evaluating several variants of LLaMA/Vicuna. We will publicly release 80 MT-bench questions, 3K expert votes, and 30K conversations with human preferences from Chatbot Arena.

The way users acquire information is undergoing a paradigm shift with the advent of ChatGPT. Unlike conventional search engines, ChatGPT retrieves knowledge from the model itself and generates answers for users. ChatGPT's impressive question-answering (QA) capability has attracted more than 100 million users within a short period of time but has also raised concerns regarding its reliability. In this paper, we perform the first large-scale measurement of ChatGPT's reliability in the generic QA scenario with a carefully curated set of 5,695 questions across ten datasets and eight domains. We find that ChatGPT's reliability varies across different domains, especially underperforming in law and science questions. We also demonstrate that system roles, originally designed by OpenAI to allow users to steer ChatGPT's behavior, can impact ChatGPT's reliability. We further show that ChatGPT is vulnerable to adversarial examples, and even a single character change can negatively affect its reliability in certain cases. We believe that our study provides valuable insights into ChatGPT's reliability and underscores the need for strengthening the reliability and security of large language models (LLMs).

Large language models (LLMs) have shown incredible capabilities and transcended the natural language processing (NLP) community, with adoption throughout many services like healthcare, therapy, education, and customer service. Since users include people with critical information needs like students or patients engaging with chatbots, the safety of these systems is of prime importance. Therefore, a clear understanding of the capabilities and limitations of LLMs is necessary. To this end, we systematically evaluate toxicity in over half a million generations of ChatGPT, a popular dialogue-based LLM. We find that setting the system parameter of ChatGPT by assigning it a persona, say that of the boxer Muhammad Ali, significantly increases the toxicity of generations. Depending on the persona assigned to ChatGPT, its toxicity can increase up to 6x, with outputs engaging in incorrect stereotypes, harmful dialogue, and hurtful opinions. This may be potentially defamatory to the persona and harmful to an unsuspecting user. Furthermore, we find concerning patterns where specific entities (e.g., certain races) are targeted more than others (3x more) irrespective of the assigned persona, that reflect inherent discriminatory biases in the model. We hope that our findings inspire the broader AI community to rethink the efficacy of current safety guardrails and develop better techniques that lead to robust, safe, and trustworthy AI systems.

Evaluation is crucial in the development process of task-oriented dialogue systems. As an evaluation method, user simulation allows us to tackle issues such as scalability and cost-efficiency, making it a viable choice for large-scale automatic evaluation. To help build a human-like user simulator that can measure the quality of a dialogue, we propose the following task: simulating user satisfaction for the evaluation of task-oriented dialogue systems. The purpose of the task is to increase the evaluation power of user simulations and to make the simulation more human-like. To overcome a lack of annotated data, we propose a user satisfaction annotation dataset, USS, that includes 6,800 dialogues sampled from multiple domains, spanning real-world e-commerce dialogues, task-oriented dialogues constructed through Wizard-of-Oz experiments, and movie recommendation dialogues. All user utterances in those dialogues, as well as the dialogues themselves, have been labeled based on a 5-level satisfaction scale. We also share three baseline methods for user satisfaction prediction and action prediction tasks. Experiments conducted on the USS dataset suggest that distributed representations outperform feature-based methods. A model based on hierarchical GRUs achieves the best performance in in-domain user satisfaction prediction, while a BERT-based model has better cross-domain generalization ability.

A good conversation requires balance -- between simplicity and detail; staying on topic and changing it; asking questions and answering them. Although dialogue agents are commonly evaluated via human judgments of overall quality, the relationship between quality and these individual factors is less well-studied. In this work, we examine two controllable neural text generation methods, conditional training and weighted decoding, in order to control four important attributes for chitchat dialogue: repetition, specificity, response-relatedness and question-asking. We conduct a large-scale human evaluation to measure the effect of these control parameters on multi-turn interactive conversations on the PersonaChat task. We provide a detailed analysis of their relationship to high-level aspects of conversation, and show that by controlling combinations of these variables our models obtain clear improvements in human quality judgments.

The performance of text summarization has been greatly boosted by pre-trained language models. A main concern of existing methods is that most generated summaries are not factually inconsistent with their source documents. To alleviate the problem, many efforts have focused on developing effective factuality evaluation metrics based on natural language inference, question answering, and syntactic dependency et al. However, these approaches are limited by either their high computational complexity or the uncertainty introduced by multi-component pipelines, resulting in only partial agreement with human judgement. Most recently, large language models(LLMs) have shown excellent performance in not only text generation but also language comprehension. In this paper, we particularly explore ChatGPT's ability to evaluate factual inconsistency under a zero-shot setting by examining it on both coarse-grained and fine-grained evaluation tasks including binary entailment inference, summary ranking, and consistency rating. Experimental results indicate that ChatGPT generally outperforms previous evaluation metrics across the three tasks, indicating its great potential for factual inconsistency evaluation. However, a closer inspection of ChatGPT's output reveals certain limitations including its preference for more lexically similar candidates, false reasoning, and inadequate understanding of instructions.

The widespread availability of large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, has significantly impacted education, raising both opportunities and challenges. Students can frequently interact with LLM-powered, interactive learning tools, but their usage patterns need to be analyzed to ensure ethical usage of these tools. To better understand how students interact with LLMs in an academic setting, we introduce StudyChat, a publicly available dataset capturing real-world student interactions with an LLM-powered tutoring chatbot in a semester-long, university-level artificial intelligence (AI) course. We deploy a web application that replicates ChatGPT's core functionalities, and use it to log student interactions with the LLM while working on programming assignments. We collect 1,197 conversations, which we annotate using a dialogue act labeling schema inspired by observed interaction patterns and prior research. Additionally, we analyze these interactions, highlight behavioral trends, and analyze how specific usage patterns relate to course outcomes. StudyChat provides a rich resource for the learning sciences and AI in education communities, enabling further research into the evolving role of LLMs in education.

Despite end-to-end neural systems making significant progress in the last decade for task-oriented as well as chit-chat based dialogue systems, most dialogue systems rely on hybrid approaches which use a combination of rule-based, retrieval and generative approaches for generating a set of ranked responses. Such dialogue systems need to rely on a fallback mechanism to respond to out-of-domain or novel user queries which are not answerable within the scope of the dialog system. While, dialog systems today rely on static and unnatural responses like "I don't know the answer to that question" or "I'm not sure about that", we design a neural approach which generates responses which are contextually aware with the user query as well as say no to the user. Such customized responses provide paraphrasing ability and contextualization as well as improve the interaction with the user and reduce dialogue monotonicity. Our simple approach makes use of rules over dependency parses and a text-to-text transformer fine-tuned on synthetic data of question-response pairs generating highly relevant, grammatical as well as diverse questions. We perform automatic and manual evaluations to demonstrate the efficacy of the system.

While large neural-based conversational models have become increasingly proficient dialogue agents, recent work has highlighted safety issues with these systems. For example, these systems can be goaded into generating toxic content, which often perpetuates social biases or stereotypes. We investigate a retrieval-based method for reducing bias and toxicity in responses from chatbots. It uses in-context learning to steer a model towards safer generations. Concretely, to generate a response to an unsafe dialogue context, we retrieve demonstrations of safe responses to similar dialogue contexts. We find our method performs competitively with strong baselines without requiring training. For instance, using automatic evaluation, we find our best fine-tuned baseline only generates safe responses to unsafe dialogue contexts from DiaSafety 4.04% more than our approach. Finally, we also propose a re-ranking procedure which can further improve response safeness.

Existing conversational recommendation (CR) systems usually suffer from insufficient item information when conducted on short dialogue history and unfamiliar items. Incorporating external information (e.g., reviews) is a potential solution to alleviate this problem. Given that reviews often provide a rich and detailed user experience on different interests, they are potential ideal resources for providing high-quality recommendations within an informative conversation. In this paper, we design a novel end-to-end framework, namely, Review-augmented Conversational Recommender (RevCore), where reviews are seamlessly incorporated to enrich item information and assist in generating both coherent and informative responses. In detail, we extract sentiment-consistent reviews, perform review-enriched and entity-based recommendations for item suggestions, as well as use a review-attentive encoder-decoder for response generation. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our approach in yielding better performance on both recommendation and conversation responding.

The latest large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, exhibit strong capabilities in automated mental health analysis. However, existing relevant studies bear several limitations, including inadequate evaluations, lack of prompting strategies, and ignorance of exploring LLMs for explainability. To bridge these gaps, we comprehensively evaluate the mental health analysis and emotional reasoning ability of LLMs on 11 datasets across 5 tasks. We explore the effects of different prompting strategies with unsupervised and distantly supervised emotional information. Based on these prompts, we explore LLMs for interpretable mental health analysis by instructing them to generate explanations for each of their decisions. We convey strict human evaluations to assess the quality of the generated explanations, leading to a novel dataset with 163 human-assessed explanations. We benchmark existing automatic evaluation metrics on this dataset to guide future related works. According to the results, ChatGPT shows strong in-context learning ability but still has a significant gap with advanced task-specific methods. Careful prompt engineering with emotional cues and expert-written few-shot examples can also effectively improve performance on mental health analysis. In addition, ChatGPT generates explanations that approach human performance, showing its great potential in explainable mental health analysis.

The explosion of data in recent years is driving individuals to leverage technology to generate insights. Traditional tools bring heavy learning overheads and the requirement for understanding complex charting techniques. Such barriers can hinder those who may benefit from harnessing data for informed decision making. The emerging field of generating data visualisations from natural language text (NL2VIS) addresses this issue. This study showcases Chat2VIS, a state-of-the-art NL2VIS solution. It capitalises on the latest in AI technology with the upsurge in pre-trained large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-3, Codex, and ChatGPT. Furthermore, the rise in natural language interfaces (NLI) and chatbots is taking centre stage. This work illustrates how Chat2VIS leverages similar techniques to fine-tune data visualisation components beyond that demonstrated in previous approaches. In addition, this paper presents the flexibility of Chat2VIS to comprehend multilingual natural language requests. No other NL2VIS system has demonstrated this unique talent. In concluding, this research provides quantitative benchmarking evaluations to contribute to the paucity of NL2VIS standards.

In this paper, we uncover a systematic bias in the evaluation paradigm of adopting large language models~(LLMs), e.g., GPT-4, as a referee to score and compare the quality of responses generated by candidate models. We find that the quality ranking of candidate responses can be easily hacked by simply altering their order of appearance in the context. This manipulation allows us to skew the evaluation result, making one model appear considerably superior to the other, e.g., Vicuna-13B could beat ChatGPT on 66 over 80 tested queries with ChatGPT as an evaluator. To address this issue, we propose a calibration framework with three simple yet effective strategies: 1) Multiple Evidence Calibration, which requires the evaluator model to generate multiple evaluation evidence before assigning ratings; 2) Balanced Position Calibration, which aggregates results across various orders to determine the final score; 3) Human-in-the-Loop Calibration, which introduces a balanced position diversity entropy to measure the difficulty of each example and seeks human assistance when needed. We also manually annotate the "win/tie/lose" outcomes of responses from ChatGPT and Vicuna-13B in the Vicuna Benchmark's question prompt, and extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach successfully mitigates evaluation bias, resulting in closer alignment with human judgments. We release our code and human annotation at https://github.com/i-Eval/FairEval to facilitate future research.

Chat models (i.e. language models trained to follow instructions through conversation with humans) outperform base models (i.e. trained solely on unlabeled data) in both conversation and general task-solving abilities. These models are generally English-centric and require further adaptation for languages that are underrepresented in or absent from their training data. A common technique for adapting base models is to extend the model's vocabulary with target language tokens, i.e. vocabulary expansion (VE), and then continually pre-train it on language-specific data. Using chat data is ideal for chat model adaptation, but often, either this does not exist or is costly to construct. Alternatively, adapting chat models with unlabeled data is a possible solution, but it could result in catastrophic forgetting. In this paper, we investigate the impact of using unlabeled target language data for VE on chat models for the first time. We first show that off-the-shelf VE generally performs well across target language tasks and models in 71% of cases, though it underperforms in scenarios where source chat models are already strong. To further improve adapted models, we propose post-hoc techniques that inject information from the source model without requiring any further training. Experiments reveal the effectiveness of our methods, helping the adapted models to achieve performance improvements in 87% of cases.

Red-teaming has been a widely adopted way to evaluate the harmfulness of Large Language Models (LLMs). It aims to jailbreak a model's safety behavior to make it act as a helpful agent disregarding the harmfulness of the query. Existing methods are primarily based on input text-based red-teaming such as adversarial prompts, low-resource prompts, or contextualized prompts to condition the model in a way to bypass its safe behavior. Bypassing the guardrails uncovers hidden harmful information and biases in the model that are left untreated or newly introduced by its safety training. However, prompt-based attacks fail to provide such a diagnosis owing to their low attack success rate, and applicability to specific models. In this paper, we present a new perspective on LLM safety research i.e., parametric red-teaming through Unalignment. It simply (instruction) tunes the model parameters to break model guardrails that are not deeply rooted in the model's behavior. Unalignment using as few as 100 examples can significantly bypass commonly referred to as CHATGPT, to the point where it responds with an 88% success rate to harmful queries on two safety benchmark datasets. On open-source models such as VICUNA-7B and LLAMA-2-CHAT 7B AND 13B, it shows an attack success rate of more than 91%. On bias evaluations, Unalignment exposes inherent biases in safety-aligned models such as CHATGPT and LLAMA- 2-CHAT where the model's responses are strongly biased and opinionated 64% of the time.

Persuasion plays a pivotal role in a wide range of applications from health intervention to the promotion of social good. Persuasive chatbots can accelerate the positive effects of persuasion in such applications. Existing methods rely on fine-tuning persuasive chatbots with task-specific training data which is costly, if not infeasible, to collect. To address this issue, we propose a method to leverage the generalizability and inherent persuasive abilities of large language models (LLMs) in creating effective and truthful persuasive chatbot for any given domain in a zero-shot manner. Unlike previous studies which used pre-defined persuasion strategies, our method first uses an LLM to generate responses, then extracts the strategies used on the fly, and replaces any unsubstantiated claims in the response with retrieved facts supporting the strategies. We applied our chatbot, PersuaBot, to three significantly different domains needing persuasion skills: donation solicitation, recommendations, and health intervention. Our experiments on simulated and human conversations show that our zero-shot approach is more persuasive than prior work, while achieving factual accuracy surpassing state-of-the-art knowledge-oriented chatbots. Our study demonstrated that when persuasive chatbots are employed responsibly for social good, it is an enabler of positive individual and social change.

Building open-domain chatbots is a challenging area for machine learning research. While prior work has shown that scaling neural models in the number of parameters and the size of the data they are trained on gives improved results, we show that other ingredients are important for a high-performing chatbot. Good conversation requires a number of skills that an expert conversationalist blends in a seamless way: providing engaging talking points and listening to their partners, and displaying knowledge, empathy and personality appropriately, while maintaining a consistent persona. We show that large scale models can learn these skills when given appropriate training data and choice of generation strategy. We build variants of these recipes with 90M, 2.7B and 9.4B parameter models, and make our models and code publicly available. Human evaluations show our best models are superior to existing approaches in multi-turn dialogue in terms of engagingness and humanness measurements. We then discuss the limitations of this work by analyzing failure cases of our models.

As AI chatbots become ubiquitous, voice interaction presents a compelling way to enable rapid, high-bandwidth communication for both semantic and social signals. This has driven research into Large Audio Models (LAMs) to power voice-native experiences. However, aligning LAM development with user goals requires a clear understanding of user needs and preferences to establish reliable progress metrics. This study addresses these challenges by introducing an interactive approach to evaluate LAMs and collecting 7,500 LAM interactions from 484 participants. Through topic modeling of user queries, we identify primary use cases for audio interfaces. We then analyze user preference rankings and qualitative feedback to determine which models best align with user needs. Finally, we evaluate how static benchmarks predict interactive performance - our analysis reveals no individual benchmark strongly correlates with interactive results (tau leq 0.33 for all benchmarks). While combining multiple coarse-grained features yields modest predictive power (R^2=0.30), only two out of twenty datasets on spoken question answering and age prediction show significantly positive correlations. This suggests a clear need to develop LAM evaluations that better correlate with user preferences.

The chit-chat-based conversational recommendation systems (CRS) provide item recommendations to users through natural language interactions. To better understand user's intentions, external knowledge graphs (KG) have been introduced into chit-chat-based CRS. However, existing chit-chat-based CRS usually generate repetitive item recommendations, and they cannot properly infuse knowledge from KG into CRS to generate informative responses. To remedy these issues, we first reformulate the conversational recommendation task to highlight that the recommended items should be new and possibly interested by users. Then, we propose the Knowledge-Enriched Conversational Recommendation System (KECRS). Specifically, we develop the Bag-of-Entity (BOE) loss and the infusion loss to better integrate KG with CRS for generating more diverse and informative responses. BOE loss provides an additional supervision signal to guide CRS to learn from both human-written utterances and KG. Infusion loss bridges the gap between the word embeddings and entity embeddings by minimizing distances of the same words in these two embeddings. Moreover, we facilitate our study by constructing a high-quality KG, \ie The Movie Domain Knowledge Graph (TMDKG). Experimental results on a large-scale dataset demonstrate that KECRS outperforms state-of-the-art chit-chat-based CRS, in terms of both recommendation accuracy and response generation quality.

Fine-tuning on instruction data has been widely validated as an effective practice for implementing chat language models like ChatGPT. Scaling the diversity and quality of such data, although straightforward, stands a great chance of leading to improved performance. This paper aims to improve the upper bound of open-source models further. We first provide a systematically designed, diverse, informative, large-scale dataset of instructional conversations, UltraChat, which does not involve human queries. Our objective is to capture the breadth of interactions that a human might have with an AI assistant and employs a comprehensive framework to generate multi-turn conversation iteratively. UltraChat contains 1.5 million high-quality multi-turn dialogues and covers a wide range of topics and instructions. Our statistical analysis of UltraChat reveals its superiority in various key metrics, including scale, average length, diversity, coherence, etc., solidifying its position as a leading open-source dataset. Building upon UltraChat, we fine-tune a LLaMA model to create a powerful conversational model, UltraLLaMA. Our evaluations indicate that UltraLLaMA consistently outperforms other open-source models, including Vicuna, the previously recognized state-of-the-art open-source model. The dataset and the model will be publicly released\url{https://github.com/thunlp/UltraChat}.

We introduce the StatCan Dialogue Dataset consisting of 19,379 conversation turns between agents working at Statistics Canada and online users looking for published data tables. The conversations stem from genuine intents, are held in English or French, and lead to agents retrieving one of over 5000 complex data tables. Based on this dataset, we propose two tasks: (1) automatic retrieval of relevant tables based on a on-going conversation, and (2) automatic generation of appropriate agent responses at each turn. We investigate the difficulty of each task by establishing strong baselines. Our experiments on a temporal data split reveal that all models struggle to generalize to future conversations, as we observe a significant drop in performance across both tasks when we move from the validation to the test set. In addition, we find that response generation models struggle to decide when to return a table. Considering that the tasks pose significant challenges to existing models, we encourage the community to develop models for our task, which can be directly used to help knowledge workers find relevant tables for live chat users.

There has been growing interest in using neural networks and deep learning techniques to create dialogue systems. Conversational recommendation is an interesting setting for the scientific exploration of dialogue with natural language as the associated discourse involves goal-driven dialogue that often transforms naturally into more free-form chat. This paper provides two contributions. First, until now there has been no publicly available large-scale dataset consisting of real-world dialogues centered around recommendations. To address this issue and to facilitate our exploration here, we have collected ReDial, a dataset consisting of over 10,000 conversations centered around the theme of providing movie recommendations. We make this data available to the community for further research. Second, we use this dataset to explore multiple facets of conversational recommendations. In particular we explore new neural architectures, mechanisms, and methods suitable for composing conversational recommendation systems. Our dataset allows us to systematically probe model sub-components addressing different parts of the overall problem domain ranging from: sentiment analysis and cold-start recommendation generation to detailed aspects of how natural language is used in this setting in the real world. We combine such sub-components into a full-blown dialogue system and examine its behavior.

The tasks of out-of-domain (OOD) intent discovery and generalized intent discovery (GID) aim to extend a closed intent classifier to open-world intent sets, which is crucial to task-oriented dialogue (TOD) systems. Previous methods address them by fine-tuning discriminative models. Recently, although some studies have been exploring the application of large language models (LLMs) represented by ChatGPT to various downstream tasks, it is still unclear for the ability of ChatGPT to discover and incrementally extent OOD intents. In this paper, we comprehensively evaluate ChatGPT on OOD intent discovery and GID, and then outline the strengths and weaknesses of ChatGPT. Overall, ChatGPT exhibits consistent advantages under zero-shot settings, but is still at a disadvantage compared to fine-tuned models. More deeply, through a series of analytical experiments, we summarize and discuss the challenges faced by LLMs including clustering, domain-specific understanding, and cross-domain in-context learning scenarios. Finally, we provide empirical guidance for future directions to address these challenges.

Large language models have shown good performances in generating code to meet human requirements. However, human requirements expressed in natural languages can be vague, incomplete, and ambiguous, leading large language models to misunderstand human requirements and make mistakes. Worse, it is difficult for a human user to refine the requirement. To help human users refine their requirements and improve large language models' code generation performances, we propose ChatCoder: a method to refine the requirements via chatting with large language models. We design a chat scheme in which the large language models will guide the human users to refine their expression of requirements to be more precise, unambiguous, and complete than before. Experiments show that ChatCoder has improved existing large language models' performance by a large margin. Besides, ChatCoder has the advantage over refine-based methods and LLMs fine-tuned via human response.

Providing explainable and faithful feedback is crucial for automated student answer assessment. In this paper, we introduce a novel framework that explores using ChatGPT, a cutting-edge large language model, for the concurrent tasks of student answer scoring and rationale generation. We identify the appropriate instructions by prompting ChatGPT with different templates to collect the rationales, where inconsistent rationales are refined to align with marking standards. The refined ChatGPT outputs enable us to fine-tune a smaller language model that simultaneously assesses student answers and provides rationales. Extensive experiments on the benchmark dataset show that the proposed method improves the overall QWK score by 11% compared to ChatGPT. Furthermore, our thorough analysis and human evaluation demonstrate that the rationales generated by our proposed method are comparable to those of ChatGPT. Our approach provides a viable solution to achieve explainable automated assessment in education. Code available at https://github.com/lijiazheng99/aera.

Spurred by advancements in scale, large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated the ability to perform a variety of natural language processing (NLP) tasks zero-shot -- i.e., without adaptation on downstream data. Recently, the debut of ChatGPT has drawn a great deal of attention from the natural language processing (NLP) community due to the fact that it can generate high-quality responses to human input and self-correct previous mistakes based on subsequent conversations. However, it is not yet known whether ChatGPT can serve as a generalist model that can perform many NLP tasks zero-shot. In this work, we empirically analyze the zero-shot learning ability of ChatGPT by evaluating it on 20 popular NLP datasets covering 7 representative task categories. With extensive empirical studies, we demonstrate both the effectiveness and limitations of the current version of ChatGPT. We find that ChatGPT performs well on many tasks favoring reasoning capabilities (e.g., arithmetic reasoning) while it still faces challenges when solving specific tasks such as sequence tagging. We additionally provide in-depth analysis through qualitative case studies.

Traditional recommendation systems estimate user preference on items from past interaction history, thus suffering from the limitations of obtaining fine-grained and dynamic user preference. Conversational recommendation system (CRS) brings revolutions to those limitations by enabling the system to directly ask users about their preferred attributes on items. However, existing CRS methods do not make full use of such advantage -- they only use the attribute feedback in rather implicit ways such as updating the latent user representation. In this paper, we propose Conversational Path Reasoning (CPR), a generic framework that models conversational recommendation as an interactive path reasoning problem on a graph. It walks through the attribute vertices by following user feedback, utilizing the user preferred attributes in an explicit way. By leveraging on the graph structure, CPR is able to prune off many irrelevant candidate attributes, leading to better chance of hitting user preferred attributes. To demonstrate how CPR works, we propose a simple yet effective instantiation named SCPR (Simple CPR). We perform empirical studies on the multi-round conversational recommendation scenario, the most realistic CRS setting so far that considers multiple rounds of asking attributes and recommending items. Through extensive experiments on two datasets Yelp and LastFM, we validate the effectiveness of our SCPR, which significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art CRS methods EAR (arXiv:2002.09102) and CRM (arXiv:1806.03277). In particular, we find that the more attributes there are, the more advantages our method can achieve.

Response retrieval is a subset of neural ranking in which a model selects a suitable response from a set of candidates given a conversation history. Retrieval-based chat-bots are typically employed in information seeking conversational systems such as customer support agents. In order to make pairwise comparisons between a conversation history and a candidate response, two approaches are common: cross-encoders performing full self-attention over the pair and bi-encoders encoding the pair separately. The former gives better prediction quality but is too slow for practical use. In this paper, we propose a new cross-encoder architecture and transfer knowledge from this model to a bi-encoder model using distillation. This effectively boosts bi-encoder performance at no cost during inference time. We perform a detailed analysis of this approach on three response retrieval datasets.

Conversational recommender system is an emerging area that has garnered an increasing interest in the community, especially with the advancements in large language models (LLMs) that enable diverse reasoning over conversational input. Despite the progress, the field has many aspects left to explore. The currently available public datasets for conversational recommendation lack specific user preferences and explanations for recommendations, hindering high-quality recommendations. To address such challenges, we present a novel conversational recommendation dataset named PEARL, synthesized with persona- and knowledge-augmented LLM simulators. We obtain detailed persona and knowledge from real-world reviews and construct a large-scale dataset with over 57k dialogues. Our experimental results demonstrate that utterances in PEARL include more specific user preferences, show expertise in the target domain, and provide recommendations more relevant to the dialogue context than those in prior datasets.

The detailed clinical records drafted by doctors after each patient's visit are crucial for medical practitioners and researchers. Automating the creation of these notes with language models can reduce the workload of doctors. However, training such models can be difficult due to the limited public availability of conversations between patients and doctors. In this paper, we introduce NoteChat, a cooperative multi-agent framework leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) for generating synthetic doctor-patient conversations conditioned on clinical notes. NoteChat consists of Planning, Roleplay, and Polish modules. We provide a comprehensive automatic and human evaluation of NoteChat, comparing it with state-of-the-art models, including OpenAI's ChatGPT and GPT-4. Results demonstrate that NoteChat facilitates high-quality synthetic doctor-patient conversations, underscoring the untapped potential of LLMs in healthcare. This work represents the first instance of multiple LLMs cooperating to complete a doctor-patient conversation conditioned on clinical notes, offering promising avenues for the intersection of AI and healthcare

This paper presents a comprehensive survey of ChatGPT and GPT-4, state-of-the-art large language models (LLM) from the GPT series, and their prospective applications across diverse domains. Indeed, key innovations such as large-scale pre-training that captures knowledge across the entire world wide web, instruction fine-tuning and Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) have played significant roles in enhancing LLMs' adaptability and performance. We performed an in-depth analysis of 194 relevant papers on arXiv, encompassing trend analysis, word cloud representation, and distribution analysis across various application domains. The findings reveal a significant and increasing interest in ChatGPT/GPT-4 research, predominantly centered on direct natural language processing applications, while also demonstrating considerable potential in areas ranging from education and history to mathematics, medicine, and physics. This study endeavors to furnish insights into ChatGPT's capabilities, potential implications, ethical concerns, and offer direction for future advancements in this field.

Target-guided response generation enables dialogue systems to smoothly transition a conversation from a dialogue context toward a target sentence. Such control is useful for designing dialogue systems that direct a conversation toward specific goals, such as creating non-obtrusive recommendations or introducing new topics in the conversation. In this paper, we introduce a new technique for target-guided response generation, which first finds a bridging path of commonsense knowledge concepts between the source and the target, and then uses the identified bridging path to generate transition responses. Additionally, we propose techniques to re-purpose existing dialogue datasets for target-guided generation. Experiments reveal that the proposed techniques outperform various baselines on this task. Finally, we observe that the existing automated metrics for this task correlate poorly with human judgement ratings. We propose a novel evaluation metric that we demonstrate is more reliable for target-guided response evaluation. Our work generally enables dialogue system designers to exercise more control over the conversations that their systems produce.

Knowledge-grounded conversation (KGC) shows great potential in building an engaging and knowledgeable chatbot, and knowledge selection is a key ingredient in it. However, previous methods for knowledge selection only concentrate on the relevance between knowledge and dialogue context, ignoring the fact that age, hobby, education and life experience of an interlocutor have a major effect on his or her personal preference over external knowledge. Without taking the personalization issue into account, it is difficult to select the proper knowledge and generate persona-consistent responses. In this work, we introduce personal memory into knowledge selection in KGC to address the personalization issue. We propose a variational method to model the underlying relationship between one's personal memory and his or her selection of knowledge, and devise a learning scheme in which the forward mapping from personal memory to knowledge and its inverse mapping is included in a closed loop so that they could teach each other. Experiment results show that our method outperforms existing KGC methods significantly on both automatic evaluation and human evaluation.

Large language model (LLM) powered chatbots are primarily text-based today, and impose a large interactional cognitive load, especially for exploratory or sensemaking tasks such as planning a trip or learning about a new city. Because the interaction is textual, users have little scaffolding in the way of structure, informational "scent", or ability to specify high-level preferences or goals. We introduce ExploreLLM that allows users to structure thoughts, help explore different options, navigate through the choices and recommendations, and to more easily steer models to generate more personalized responses. We conduct a user study and show that users find it helpful to use ExploreLLM for exploratory or planning tasks, because it provides a useful schema-like structure to the task, and guides users in planning. The study also suggests that users can more easily personalize responses with high-level preferences with ExploreLLM. Together, ExploreLLM points to a future where users interact with LLMs beyond the form of chatbots, and instead designed to support complex user tasks with a tighter integration between natural language and graphical user interfaces.

As large language models improve, there is increasing interest in techniques that leverage these models' capabilities to refine their own outputs. In this work, we introduce Shepherd, a language model specifically tuned to critique responses and suggest refinements, extending beyond the capabilities of an untuned model to identify diverse errors and provide suggestions to remedy them. At the core of our approach is a high quality feedback dataset, which we curate from community feedback and human annotations. Even though Shepherd is small (7B parameters), its critiques are either equivalent or preferred to those from established models including ChatGPT. Using GPT-4 for evaluation, Shepherd reaches an average win-rate of 53-87% compared to competitive alternatives. In human evaluation, Shepherd strictly outperforms other models and on average closely ties with ChatGPT.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used as chatbots, yet their ability to personalize responses to user preferences remains limited. We introduce PrefEval, a benchmark for evaluating LLMs' ability to infer, memorize and adhere to user preferences in a long-context conversational setting. PrefEval comprises 3,000 manually curated user preference and query pairs spanning 20 topics. PrefEval contains user personalization or preference information in both explicit and implicit forms, and evaluates LLM performance using a generation and a classification task. With PrefEval, we evaluated the aforementioned preference following capabilities of 10 open-source and proprietary LLMs in multi-session conversations with varying context lengths up to 100k tokens. We benchmark with various prompting, iterative feedback, and retrieval-augmented generation methods. Our benchmarking effort reveals that state-of-the-art LLMs face significant challenges in proactively following users' preferences during conversations. In particular, in zero-shot settings, preference following accuracy falls below 10% at merely 10 turns (~3k tokens) across most evaluated models. Even with advanced prompting and retrieval methods, preference following still deteriorates in long-context conversations. Furthermore, we show that fine-tuning on PrefEval significantly improves performance. We believe PrefEval serves as a valuable resource for measuring, understanding, and enhancing LLMs' preference following abilities, paving the way for personalized conversational agents. Our code and dataset are available at https://prefeval.github.io/.

The introduction of ChatGPT has put Artificial Intelligence (AI) Natural Language Processing (NLP) in the spotlight. ChatGPT adoption has been exponential with millions of users experimenting with it in a myriad of tasks and application domains with impressive results. However, ChatGPT has limitations and suffers hallucinations, for example producing answers that look plausible but they are completely wrong. Evaluating the performance of ChatGPT and similar AI tools is a complex issue that is being explored from different perspectives. In this work, we contribute to those efforts with ChatWords, an automated test system, to evaluate ChatGPT knowledge of an arbitrary set of words. ChatWords is designed to be extensible, easy to use, and adaptable to evaluate also other NLP AI tools. ChatWords is publicly available and its main goal is to facilitate research on the lexical knowledge of AI tools. The benefits of ChatWords are illustrated with two case studies: evaluating the knowledge that ChatGPT has of the Spanish lexicon (taken from the official dictionary of the "Real Academia Espa\~nola") and of the words that appear in the Quixote, the well-known novel written by Miguel de Cervantes. The results show that ChatGPT is only able to recognize approximately 80% of the words in the dictionary and 90% of the words in the Quixote, in some cases with an incorrect meaning. The implications of the lexical knowledge of NLP AI tools and potential applications of ChatWords are also discussed providing directions for further work on the study of the lexical knowledge of AI tools.

Large language models have demonstrated remarkable performance across various natural language processing tasks; however, their efficacy in more challenging and domain-specific tasks remains less explored. This paper introduces the GAOKAO-Benchmark (GAOKAO-Bench), an intuitive benchmark that employs questions from the Chinese Gaokao examination as test samples for evaluating large language models.In order to align the evaluation results with humans as much as possible, we designed a method based on zero-shot prompts to analyze the accuracy and scoring rate of the model by dividing the questions into subjective and objective types. We evaluated the ChatGPT model on GAOKAO-Benchmark performance.Our findings reveal that the ChatGPT model excels in tackling objective questions, while also shedding light on its shortcomings and areas for improvement. To further scrutinize the model's responses, we incorporate human evaluations.In conclusion, this research contributes a robust evaluation benchmark for future large-scale language models and offers valuable insights into the limitations of such models.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated a remarkable ability to generalize zero-shot to various language-related tasks. This paper focuses on the study of exploring generative LLMs such as ChatGPT and GPT-4 for relevance ranking in Information Retrieval (IR). Surprisingly, our experiments reveal that properly instructed ChatGPT and GPT-4 can deliver competitive, even superior results than supervised methods on popular IR benchmarks. Notably, GPT-4 outperforms the fully fine-tuned monoT5-3B on MS MARCO by an average of 2.7 nDCG on TREC datasets, an average of 2.3 nDCG on eight BEIR datasets, and an average of 2.7 nDCG on ten low-resource languages Mr.TyDi. Subsequently, we delve into the potential for distilling the ranking capabilities of ChatGPT into a specialized model. Our small specialized model that trained on 10K ChatGPT generated data outperforms monoT5 trained on 400K annotated MS MARCO data on BEIR. The code to reproduce our results is available at www.github.com/sunnweiwei/RankGPT

We present GLM-Dialog, a large-scale language model (LLM) with 10B parameters capable of knowledge-grounded conversation in Chinese using a search engine to access the Internet knowledge. GLM-Dialog offers a series of applicable techniques for exploiting various external knowledge including both helpful and noisy knowledge, enabling the creation of robust knowledge-grounded dialogue LLMs with limited proper datasets. To evaluate the GLM-Dialog more fairly, we also propose a novel evaluation method to allow humans to converse with multiple deployed bots simultaneously and compare their performance implicitly instead of explicitly rating using multidimensional metrics.Comprehensive evaluations from automatic to human perspective demonstrate the advantages of GLM-Dialog comparing with existing open source Chinese dialogue models. We release both the model checkpoint and source code, and also deploy it as a WeChat application to interact with users. We offer our evaluation platform online in an effort to prompt the development of open source models and reliable dialogue evaluation systems. The additional easy-to-use toolkit that consists of short text entity linking, query generation, and helpful knowledge classification is also released to enable diverse applications. All the source code is available on Github.

Language Models (LMs) often cannot be deployed because of their potential to harm users in hard-to-predict ways. Prior work identifies harmful behaviors before deployment by using human annotators to hand-write test cases. However, human annotation is expensive, limiting the number and diversity of test cases. In this work, we automatically find cases where a target LM behaves in a harmful way, by generating test cases ("red teaming") using another LM. We evaluate the target LM's replies to generated test questions using a classifier trained to detect offensive content, uncovering tens of thousands of offensive replies in a 280B parameter LM chatbot. We explore several methods, from zero-shot generation to reinforcement learning, for generating test cases with varying levels of diversity and difficulty. Furthermore, we use prompt engineering to control LM-generated test cases to uncover a variety of other harms, automatically finding groups of people that the chatbot discusses in offensive ways, personal and hospital phone numbers generated as the chatbot's own contact info, leakage of private training data in generated text, and harms that occur over the course of a conversation. Overall, LM-based red teaming is one promising tool (among many needed) for finding and fixing diverse, undesirable LM behaviors before impacting users.

This document presents a detailed description of the challenge on clarifying questions for dialogue systems (ClariQ). The challenge is organized as part of the Conversational AI challenge series (ConvAI3) at Search Oriented Conversational AI (SCAI) EMNLP workshop in 2020. The main aim of the conversational systems is to return an appropriate answer in response to the user requests. However, some user requests might be ambiguous. In IR settings such a situation is handled mainly thought the diversification of the search result page. It is however much more challenging in dialogue settings with limited bandwidth. Therefore, in this challenge, we provide a common evaluation framework to evaluate mixed-initiative conversations. Participants are asked to rank clarifying questions in an information-seeking conversations. The challenge is organized in two stages where in Stage 1 we evaluate the submissions in an offline setting and single-turn conversations. Top participants of Stage 1 get the chance to have their model tested by human annotators.

The recently released ChatGPT model demonstrates unprecedented capabilities in zero-shot question-answering. In this work, we probe ChatGPT for its conversational understanding and introduce a conversational framework (protocol) that can be adopted in future studies. The Pok\'emon universe serves as an ideal testing ground for auditing ChatGPT's reasoning capabilities due to its closed world assumption. After bringing ChatGPT's background knowledge (on the Pok\'emon universe) to light, we test its reasoning process when using these concepts in battle scenarios. We then evaluate its ability to acquire new knowledge and include it in its reasoning process. Our ultimate goal is to assess ChatGPT's ability to generalize, combine features, and to acquire and reason over newly introduced knowledge from human feedback. We find that ChatGPT has prior knowledge of the Pokemon universe, which can reason upon in battle scenarios to a great extent, even when new information is introduced. The model performs better with collaborative feedback and if there is an initial phase of information retrieval, but also hallucinates occasionally and is susceptible to adversarial attacks.

As large language models (LLMs) continue to advance, accurately and comprehensively evaluating their performance becomes increasingly challenging. Human evaluations are conventionally considered the gold standard in natural language generation, but recent advancements incorporate state-of-the-art LLMs as proxies for human judges in evaluation processes. However, the extent to which humans and LLMs are capable evaluators remains uncertain. This study investigates the behavior of crowd-sourced and expert annotators, as well as LLMs, when comparing outputs from different models. To achieve this, we curate a dataset of intentionally flawed machine-generated answers. Our findings reveal a concerning bias in the evaluation process, as answers with factual errors are rated more favorably than answers that are too short or contained grammatical errors. To address this issue, we propose independently evaluating machine-generated text across multiple dimensions, rather than merging all the evaluation aspects into a single score. We instantiate this idea with the Elo rating system, resulting in the Multi-Elo Rating System. Empirical results from our study reveal that this proposed approach significantly enhances the quality of LLM-based evaluations, particularly in terms of factual accuracy. However, there is no significant improvement in crowd-sourced-based evaluations, indicating the need for further investigation and refinement.

In this paper, we present empirical studies on conversational recommendation tasks using representative large language models in a zero-shot setting with three primary contributions. (1) Data: To gain insights into model behavior in "in-the-wild" conversational recommendation scenarios, we construct a new dataset of recommendation-related conversations by scraping a popular discussion website. This is the largest public real-world conversational recommendation dataset to date. (2) Evaluation: On the new dataset and two existing conversational recommendation datasets, we observe that even without fine-tuning, large language models can outperform existing fine-tuned conversational recommendation models. (3) Analysis: We propose various probing tasks to investigate the mechanisms behind the remarkable performance of large language models in conversational recommendation. We analyze both the large language models' behaviors and the characteristics of the datasets, providing a holistic understanding of the models' effectiveness, limitations and suggesting directions for the design of future conversational recommenders

Despite remarkable advances that large language models have achieved in chatbots, maintaining a non-toxic user-AI interactive environment has become increasingly critical nowadays. However, previous efforts in toxicity detection have been mostly based on benchmarks derived from social media content, leaving the unique challenges inherent to real-world user-AI interactions insufficiently explored. In this work, we introduce ToxicChat, a novel benchmark based on real user queries from an open-source chatbot. This benchmark contains the rich, nuanced phenomena that can be tricky for current toxicity detection models to identify, revealing a significant domain difference compared to social media content. Our systematic evaluation of models trained on existing toxicity datasets has shown their shortcomings when applied to this unique domain of ToxicChat. Our work illuminates the potentially overlooked challenges of toxicity detection in real-world user-AI conversations. In the future, ToxicChat can be a valuable resource to drive further advancements toward building a safe and healthy environment for user-AI interactions.

This paper explores the use of open generative Large Language Models (LLMs) for annotation tasks in the social sciences. The study highlights the challenges associated with proprietary models, such as limited reproducibility and privacy concerns, and advocates for the adoption of open (source) models that can be operated on independent devices. Two examples of annotation tasks, sentiment analysis in tweets and identification of leisure activities in childhood aspirational essays are provided. The study evaluates the performance of different prompting strategies and models (neural-chat-7b-v3-2, Starling-LM-7B-alpha, openchat_3.5, zephyr-7b-alpha and zephyr-7b-beta). The results indicate the need for careful validation and tailored prompt engineering. The study highlights the advantages of open models for data privacy and reproducibility.

Large Language Models (LLMs) especially ChatGPT have produced impressive results in various areas, but their potential human-like psychology is still largely unexplored. Existing works study the virtual personalities of LLMs but rarely explore the possibility of analyzing human personalities via LLMs. This paper presents a generic evaluation framework for LLMs to assess human personalities based on Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) tests. Specifically, we first devise unbiased prompts by randomly permuting options in MBTI questions and adopt the average testing result to encourage more impartial answer generation. Then, we propose to replace the subject in question statements to enable flexible queries and assessments on different subjects from LLMs. Finally, we re-formulate the question instructions in a manner of correctness evaluation to facilitate LLMs to generate clearer responses. The proposed framework enables LLMs to flexibly assess personalities of different groups of people. We further propose three evaluation metrics to measure the consistency, robustness, and fairness of assessment results from state-of-the-art LLMs including ChatGPT and InstructGPT. Our experiments reveal ChatGPT's ability to assess human personalities, and the average results demonstrate that it can achieve more consistent and fairer assessments in spite of lower robustness against prompt biases compared with InstructGPT.

Recommender systems exploit interaction history to estimate user preference, having been heavily used in a wide range of industry applications. However, static recommendation models are difficult to answer two important questions well due to inherent shortcomings: (a) What exactly does a user like? (b) Why does a user like an item? The shortcomings are due to the way that static models learn user preference, i.e., without explicit instructions and active feedback from users. The recent rise of conversational recommender systems (CRSs) changes this situation fundamentally. In a CRS, users and the system can dynamically communicate through natural language interactions, which provide unprecedented opportunities to explicitly obtain the exact preference of users. Considerable efforts, spread across disparate settings and applications, have been put into developing CRSs. Existing models, technologies, and evaluation methods for CRSs are far from mature. In this paper, we provide a systematic review of the techniques used in current CRSs. We summarize the key challenges of developing CRSs in five directions: (1) Question-based user preference elicitation. (2) Multi-turn conversational recommendation strategies. (3) Dialogue understanding and generation. (4) Exploitation-exploration trade-offs. (5) Evaluation and user simulation. These research directions involve multiple research fields like information retrieval (IR), natural language processing (NLP), and human-computer interaction (HCI). Based on these research directions, we discuss some future challenges and opportunities. We provide a road map for researchers from multiple communities to get started in this area. We hope this survey can help to identify and address challenges in CRSs and inspire future research.

Conversational Recommender System (CRS), which aims to recommend high-quality items to users through interactive conversations, has gained great research interest recently. A CRS is usually composed of a recommendation module and a generation module. In the previous work, these two modules are loosely connected in the model training and are shallowly integrated during inference, where a simple switching or copy mechanism is adopted to incorporate recommended items into generated responses. Moreover, the current end-to-end neural models trained on small crowd-sourcing datasets (e.g., 10K dialogs in the ReDial dataset) tend to overfit and have poor chit-chat ability. In this work, we propose a novel unified framework that integrates recommendation into the dialog (RecInDial) generation by introducing a vocabulary pointer. To tackle the low-resource issue in CRS, we finetune the large-scale pretrained language models to generate fluent and diverse responses, and introduce a knowledge-aware bias learned from an entity-oriented knowledge graph to enhance the recommendation performance. Furthermore, we propose to evaluate the CRS models in an end-to-end manner, which can reflect the overall performance of the entire system rather than the performance of individual modules, compared to the separate evaluations of the two modules used in previous work. Experiments on the benchmark dataset ReDial show our RecInDial model significantly surpasses the state-of-the-art methods. More extensive analyses show the effectiveness of our model.

Educational chatbots are a promising tool for assisting student learning. However, the development of effective chatbots in education has been challenging, as high-quality data is seldom available in this domain. In this paper, we propose a framework for generating synthetic teacher-student interactions grounded in a set of textbooks. Our approaches capture one aspect of learning interactions where curious students with partial knowledge interactively ask a teacher questions about the material in the textbook. We highlight various quality criteria that such dialogues should fulfill and compare several approaches relying on either prompting or fine-tuning large language models. We use synthetic dialogues to train educational chatbots and show benefits of further fine-tuning in different educational domains. However, human evaluation shows that our best data synthesis method still suffers from hallucinations and tends to reiterate information from previous conversations. Our findings offer insights for future efforts in synthesizing conversational data that strikes a balance between size and quality. We will open-source our data and code.

Training Large Language Models (LLMs) with Reinforcement Learning from AI Feedback (RLAIF) aligns model outputs more closely with human preferences. This involves an evaluator model ranking multiple candidate responses to user prompts. However, the rankings from popular evaluator models such as GPT-4 can be inconsistent. We propose the Repeat Ranking method - where we evaluate the same responses multiple times and train only on those responses which are consistently ranked. Using 2,714 prompts in 62 languages, we generated responses from 7 top multilingual LLMs and had GPT-4 rank them five times each. Evaluating on MT-Bench chat benchmarks in six languages, our method outperformed the standard practice of training on all available prompts. Our work highlights the quality versus quantity trade-off in RLAIF dataset generation and offers a stackable strategy for enhancing dataset and thus model quality.

We introduce a novel benchmark for evaluating the role-playing capabilities of language models. Our approach leverages language models themselves to emulate users in dynamic, multi-turn conversations and to assess the resulting dialogues. The framework consists of three main components: a player model assuming a specific character role, an interrogator model simulating user behavior, and a judge model evaluating conversation quality. We conducted experiments comparing automated evaluations with human annotations to validate our approach, demonstrating strong correlations across multiple criteria. This work provides a foundation for a robust and dynamic evaluation of model capabilities in interactive scenarios.

We investigate the usefulness of generative Large Language Models (LLMs) in generating training data for cross-encoder re-rankers in a novel direction: generating synthetic documents instead of synthetic queries. We introduce a new dataset, ChatGPT-RetrievalQA, and compare the effectiveness of models fine-tuned on LLM-generated and human-generated data. Data generated with generative LLMs can be used to augment training data, especially in domains with smaller amounts of labeled data. We build ChatGPT-RetrievalQA based on an existing dataset, human ChatGPT Comparison Corpus (HC3), consisting of public question collections with human responses and answers from ChatGPT. We fine-tune a range of cross-encoder re-rankers on either human-generated or ChatGPT-generated data. Our evaluation on MS MARCO DEV, TREC DL'19, and TREC DL'20 demonstrates that cross-encoder re-ranking models trained on ChatGPT responses are statistically significantly more effective zero-shot re-rankers than those trained on human responses. In a supervised setting, the human-trained re-rankers outperform the LLM-trained re-rankers. Our novel findings suggest that generative LLMs have high potential in generating training data for neural retrieval models. Further work is needed to determine the effect of factually wrong information in the generated responses and test our findings' generalizability with open-source LLMs. We release our data, code, and cross-encoders checkpoints for future work.

The recently released artificial intelligence conversational agent, ChatGPT, has gained significant attention in academia and real life. A multitude of early ChatGPT users eagerly explore its capabilities and share their opinions on it via social media. Both user queries and social media posts express public concerns regarding this advanced dialogue system. To mine public concerns about ChatGPT, a novel Self-Supervised neural Topic Model (SSTM), which formalizes topic modeling as a representation learning procedure, is proposed in this paper. Extensive experiments have been conducted on Twitter posts about ChatGPT and queries asked by ChatGPT users. And experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach could extract higher quality public concerns with improved interpretability and diversity, surpassing the performance of state-of-the-art approaches.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly applied to outpatient referral tasks across healthcare systems. However, there is a lack of standardized evaluation criteria to assess their effectiveness, particularly in dynamic, interactive scenarios. In this study, we systematically examine the capabilities and limitations of LLMs in managing tasks within Intelligent Outpatient Referral (IOR) systems and propose a comprehensive evaluation framework specifically designed for such systems. This framework comprises two core tasks: static evaluation, which focuses on evaluating the ability of predefined outpatient referrals, and dynamic evaluation, which evaluates capabilities of refining outpatient referral recommendations through iterative dialogues. Our findings suggest that LLMs offer limited advantages over BERT-like models, but show promise in asking effective questions during interactive dialogues.

There has been an increasing research interest in developing specialized dialogue systems that can offer mental health support. However, gathering large-scale and real-life multi-turn conversations for mental health support poses challenges due to the sensitivity of personal information, as well as the time and cost involved. To address these issues, we introduce the SMILE approach, an inclusive language expansion technique that employs ChatGPT to extend public single-turn dialogues into multi-turn ones. Our research first presents a preliminary exploratory study that validates the effectiveness of the SMILE approach. Furthermore, we conduct a comprehensive and systematic contrastive analysis of datasets generated with and without the SMILE approach, demonstrating that the SMILE method results in a large-scale, diverse, and close-to-real-life multi-turn mental health support conversation corpus, including dialog topics, lexical and semantic features. Finally, we use the collected corpus (SMILECHAT) to develop a more effective dialogue system that offers emotional support and constructive suggestions in multi-turn conversations for mental health support.

To evaluate Large Language Models (LLMs) for question answering (QA), traditional methods typically focus on directly assessing the immediate responses generated by the models based on the given question and context. In the common use case of humans seeking AI assistant's help in finding information, these non-interactive evaluations do not account for the dynamic nature of human-model conversations, and interaction-aware evaluations have shown that accurate QA models are preferred by humans (Lee et al., 2023). Recent works in human-computer interaction (HCI) have employed human evaluators to conduct interactions and evaluations, but they are often prohibitively expensive and time-consuming to scale. In this work, we introduce an automatic evaluation framework IQA-EVAL to Interactive Question Answering Evaluation. More specifically, we introduce LLM-based Evaluation Agent (LEA) that can: (1) simulate human behaviors to generate interactions with IQA models; (2) automatically evaluate the generated interactions. Moreover, we propose assigning personas to LEAs to better simulate groups of real human evaluators. We show that: (1) our evaluation framework with GPT-4 (or Claude) as the backbone model achieves a high correlation with human evaluations on the IQA task; (2) assigning personas to LEA to better represent the crowd further significantly improves correlations. Finally, we use our automatic metric to evaluate five recent representative LLMs with over 1000 questions from complex and ambiguous question answering tasks, which comes with a substantial cost of $5k if evaluated by humans.

The rapid advancements in large language models (LLMs) have presented challenges in evaluating those models. Existing evaluation methods are either reference-based or preference based, which inevitably need human intervention or introduce test bias caused by evaluator models. In this paper, we propose GameEval, a novel approach to evaluating LLMs through goal-driven conversational games, overcoming the limitations of previous methods. GameEval treats LLMs as game players and assigns them distinct roles with specific goals achieved by launching conversations of various forms, including discussion, question answering, and voting. We design three unique games with cooperative or adversarial objectives, accompanied by corresponding evaluation metrics, to show how this new paradigm comprehensively evaluates model performance.Through extensive experiments, we show that GameEval can effectively differentiate the capabilities of various LLMs, providing a comprehensive assessment of their integrated abilities to solve complex problems. Our public anonymous code is available at https://github.com/GameEval/GameEval.

Generative AI offers a simple, prompt-based alternative to fine-tuning smaller BERT-style LLMs for text classification tasks. This promises to eliminate the need for manually labeled training data and task-specific model training. However, it remains an open question whether tools like ChatGPT can deliver on this promise. In this paper, we show that smaller, fine-tuned LLMs (still) consistently and significantly outperform larger, zero-shot prompted models in text classification. We compare three major generative AI models (ChatGPT with GPT-3.5/GPT-4 and Claude Opus) with several fine-tuned LLMs across a diverse set of classification tasks (sentiment, approval/disapproval, emotions, party positions) and text categories (news, tweets, speeches). We find that fine-tuning with application-specific training data achieves superior performance in all cases. To make this approach more accessible to a broader audience, we provide an easy-to-use toolkit alongside this paper. Our toolkit, accompanied by non-technical step-by-step guidance, enables users to select and fine-tune BERT-like LLMs for any classification task with minimal technical and computational effort.

Language models (LMs) as conversational assistants recently became popular tools that help people accomplish a variety of tasks. These typically result from adapting LMs pretrained on general domain text sequences through further instruction-tuning and possibly preference optimisation methods. The evaluation of such LMs would ideally be performed using human judgement, however, this is not scalable. On the other hand, automatic evaluation featuring auxiliary LMs as judges and/or knowledge-based tasks is scalable but struggles with assessing conversational ability and adherence to instructions. To help accelerate the development of LMs as conversational assistants, we propose a novel automatic evaluation task: HumanRankEval (HRE). It consists of a large-scale, diverse and high-quality set of questions, each with several answers authored and scored by humans. To perform evaluation, HRE ranks these answers based on their log-likelihood under the LM's distribution, and subsequently calculates their correlation with the corresponding human rankings. We support HRE's efficacy by investigating how efficiently it separates pretrained and instruction-tuned LMs of various sizes. We show that HRE correlates well with human judgements and is particularly responsive to model changes following instruction-tuning.

Large language models (LLMs) provide a new way to build chatbots by accepting natural language prompts. Yet, it is unclear how to design prompts to power chatbots to carry on naturalistic conversations while pursuing a given goal, such as collecting self-report data from users. We explore what design factors of prompts can help steer chatbots to talk naturally and collect data reliably. To this aim, we formulated four prompt designs with different structures and personas. Through an online study (N = 48) where participants conversed with chatbots driven by different designs of prompts, we assessed how prompt designs and conversation topics affected the conversation flows and users' perceptions of chatbots. Our chatbots covered 79% of the desired information slots during conversations, and the designs of prompts and topics significantly influenced the conversation flows and the data collection performance. We discuss the opportunities and challenges of building chatbots with LLMs.

Recommender systems are embracing conversational technologies to obtain user preferences dynamically, and to overcome inherent limitations of their static models. A successful Conversational Recommender System (CRS) requires proper handling of interactions between conversation and recommendation. We argue that three fundamental problems need to be solved: 1) what questions to ask regarding item attributes, 2) when to recommend items, and 3) how to adapt to the users' online feedback. To the best of our knowledge, there lacks a unified framework that addresses these problems. In this work, we fill this missing interaction framework gap by proposing a new CRS framework named Estimation-Action-Reflection, or EAR, which consists of three stages to better converse with users. (1) Estimation, which builds predictive models to estimate user preference on both items and item attributes; (2) Action, which learns a dialogue policy to determine whether to ask attributes or recommend items, based on Estimation stage and conversation history; and (3) Reflection, which updates the recommender model when a user rejects the recommendations made by the Action stage. We present two conversation scenarios on binary and enumerated questions, and conduct extensive experiments on two datasets from Yelp and LastFM, for each scenario, respectively. Our experiments demonstrate significant improvements over the state-of-the-art method CRM [32], corresponding to fewer conversation turns and a higher level of recommendation hits.

Evaluation and ranking of large language models (LLMs) has become an important problem with the proliferation of these models and their impact. Evaluation methods either require human responses which are expensive to acquire or use pairs of LLMs to evaluate each other which can be unreliable. In this paper, we provide a novel perspective where, given a dataset of prompts (viz. questions, instructions, etc.) and a set of LLMs, we rank them without access to any ground truth or reference responses. Inspired by real life where both an expert and a knowledgeable person can identify a novice our main idea is to consider triplets of models, where each one of them evaluates the other two, correctly identifying the worst model in the triplet with high probability. We also analyze our idea and provide sufficient conditions for it to succeed. Applying this idea repeatedly, we propose two methods to rank LLMs. In experiments on different generative tasks (summarization, multiple-choice, and dialog), our methods reliably recover close to true rankings without reference data. This points to a viable low-resource mechanism for practical use.

Nowadays, open-domain dialogue models can generate acceptable responses according to the historical context based on the large-scale pre-trained language models. However, they generally concatenate the dialogue history directly as the model input to predict the response, which we named as the flat pattern and ignores the dynamic information flow across dialogue utterances. In this work, we propose the DialoFlow model, in which we introduce a dynamic flow mechanism to model the context flow, and design three training objectives to capture the information dynamics across dialogue utterances by addressing the semantic influence brought about by each utterance in large-scale pre-training. Experiments on the multi-reference Reddit Dataset and DailyDialog Dataset demonstrate that our DialoFlow significantly outperforms the DialoGPT on the dialogue generation task. Besides, we propose the Flow score, an effective automatic metric for evaluating interactive human-bot conversation quality based on the pre-trained DialoFlow, which presents high chatbot-level correlation (r=0.9) with human ratings among 11 chatbots. Code and pre-trained models will be public. \url{https://github.com/ictnlp/DialoFlow}

Conversational recommender systems offer the promise of interactive, engaging ways for users to find items they enjoy. We seek to improve conversational recommendation via three dimensions: 1) We aim to mimic a common mode of human interaction for recommendation: experts justify their suggestions, a seeker explains why they don't like the item, and both parties iterate through the dialog to find a suitable item. 2) We leverage ideas from conversational critiquing to allow users to flexibly interact with natural language justifications by critiquing subjective aspects. 3) We adapt conversational recommendation to a wider range of domains where crowd-sourced ground truth dialogs are not available. We develop a new two-part framework for training conversational recommender systems. First, we train a recommender system to jointly suggest items and justify its reasoning with subjective aspects. We then fine-tune this model to incorporate iterative user feedback via self-supervised bot-play. Experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate that our system can be applied to different recommendation models across diverse domains to achieve superior performance in conversational recommendation compared to state-of-the-art methods. We also evaluate our model on human users, showing that systems trained under our framework provide more useful, helpful, and knowledgeable recommendations in warm- and cold-start settings.

Artificial Intelligence (AI), with ChatGPT as a prominent example, has recently taken center stage in various domains including higher education, particularly in Computer Science and Engineering (CSE). The AI revolution brings both convenience and controversy, offering substantial benefits while lacking formal guidance on their application. The primary objective of this work is to comprehensively analyze the pedagogical potential of ChatGPT in CSE education, understanding its strengths and limitations from the perspectives of educators and learners. We employ a systematic approach, creating a diverse range of educational practice problems within CSE field, focusing on various subjects such as data science, programming, AI, machine learning, networks, and more. According to our examinations, certain question types, like conceptual knowledge queries, typically do not pose significant challenges to ChatGPT, and thus, are excluded from our analysis. Alternatively, we focus our efforts on developing more in-depth and personalized questions and project-based tasks. These questions are presented to ChatGPT, followed by interactions to assess its effectiveness in delivering complete and meaningful responses. To this end, we propose a comprehensive five-factor reliability analysis framework to evaluate the responses. This assessment aims to identify when ChatGPT excels and when it faces challenges. Our study concludes with a correlation analysis, delving into the relationships among subjects, task types, and limiting factors. This analysis offers valuable insights to enhance ChatGPT's utility in CSE education, providing guidance to educators and students regarding its reliability and efficacy.

Retrieval models are often evaluated on partially-annotated datasets. Each query is mapped to a few relevant texts and the remaining corpus is assumed to be irrelevant. As a result, models that successfully retrieve false negatives are punished in evaluation. Unfortunately, completely annotating all texts for every query is not resource efficient. In this work, we show that using partially-annotated datasets in evaluation can paint a distorted picture. We curate D-MERIT, a passage retrieval evaluation set from Wikipedia, aspiring to contain all relevant passages for each query. Queries describe a group (e.g., ``journals about linguistics'') and relevant passages are evidence that entities belong to the group (e.g., a passage indicating that Language is a journal about linguistics). We show that evaluating on a dataset containing annotations for only a subset of the relevant passages might result in misleading ranking of the retrieval systems and that as more relevant texts are included in the evaluation set, the rankings converge. We propose our dataset as a resource for evaluation and our study as a recommendation for balance between resource-efficiency and reliable evaluation when annotating evaluation sets for text retrieval.

Due to the lack of human resources for mental health support, there is an increasing demand for employing conversational agents for support. Recent work has demonstrated the effectiveness of dialogue models in providing emotional support. As previous studies have demonstrated that seekers' persona is an important factor for effective support, we investigate whether there are benefits to modeling such information in dialogue models for support. In this paper, our empirical analysis verifies that persona has an important impact on emotional support. Therefore, we propose a framework for dynamically inferring and modeling seekers' persona. We first train a model for inferring the seeker's persona from the conversation history. Accordingly, we propose PAL, a model that leverages persona information and, in conjunction with our strategy-based controllable generation method, provides personalized emotional support. Automatic and manual evaluations demonstrate that PAL achieves state-of-the-art results, outperforming the baselines on the studied benchmark. Our code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/chengjl19/PAL.

Large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, have rapidly penetrated into people's work and daily lives over the past few years, due to their extraordinary conversational skills and intelligence. ChatGPT has become the fastest-growing software in terms of user numbers in human history and become an important foundational model for the next generation of artificial intelligence applications. However, the generations of LLMs are not entirely reliable, often producing content with factual errors, biases, and toxicity. Given their vast number of users and wide range of application scenarios, these unreliable responses can lead to many serious negative impacts. This thesis introduces the exploratory works in the field of language model reliability during the PhD study, focusing on the correctness, non-toxicity, and fairness of LLMs from both software testing and natural language processing perspectives. First, to measure the correctness of LLMs, we introduce two testing frameworks, FactChecker and LogicAsker, to evaluate factual knowledge and logical reasoning accuracy, respectively. Second, for the non-toxicity of LLMs, we introduce two works for red-teaming LLMs. Third, to evaluate the fairness of LLMs, we introduce two evaluation frameworks, BiasAsker and XCulturalBench, to measure the social bias and cultural bias of LLMs, respectively.

Large-Language Models like GPT-3 have the potential to enable HCI designers and researchers to create more human-like and helpful chatbots for specific applications. But evaluating the feasibility of these chatbots and designing prompts that optimize GPT-3 for a specific task is challenging. We present a case study in tackling these questions, applying GPT-3 to a brief 5-minute chatbot that anyone can talk to better manage their mood. We report a randomized factorial experiment with 945 participants on Mechanical Turk that tests three dimensions of prompt design to initialize the chatbot (identity, intent, and behaviour), and present both quantitative and qualitative analyses of conversations and user perceptions of the chatbot. We hope other HCI designers and researchers can build on this case study, for other applications of GPT-3 based chatbots to specific tasks, and build on and extend the methods we use for prompt design, and evaluation of the prompt design.

Certain forms of linguistic annotation, like part of speech and semantic tagging, can be automated with high accuracy. However, manual annotation is still necessary for complex pragmatic and discursive features that lack a direct mapping to lexical forms. This manual process is time-consuming and error-prone, limiting the scalability of function-to-form approaches in corpus linguistics. To address this, our study explores automating pragma-discursive corpus annotation using large language models (LLMs). We compare ChatGPT, the Bing chatbot, and a human coder in annotating apology components in English based on the local grammar framework. We find that the Bing chatbot outperformed ChatGPT, with accuracy approaching that of a human coder. These results suggest that AI can be successfully deployed to aid pragma-discursive corpus annotation, making the process more efficient and scalable. Keywords: linguistic annotation, function-to-form approaches, large language models, local grammar analysis, Bing chatbot, ChatGPT

Over the last few years, large language models (LLMs) have emerged as the most important breakthroughs in natural language processing (NLP) that fundamentally transform research and developments in the field. ChatGPT represents one of the most exciting LLM systems developed recently to showcase impressive skills for language generation and highly attract public attention. Among various exciting applications discovered for ChatGPT in English, the model can process and generate texts for multiple languages due to its multilingual training data. Given the broad adoption of ChatGPT for English in different problems and areas, a natural question is whether ChatGPT can also be applied effectively for other languages or it is necessary to develop more language-specific technologies. The answer to this question requires a thorough evaluation of ChatGPT over multiple tasks with diverse languages and large datasets (i.e., beyond reported anecdotes), which is still missing or limited in current research. Our work aims to fill this gap for the evaluation of ChatGPT and similar LLMs to provide more comprehensive information for multilingual NLP applications. While this work will be an ongoing effort to include additional experiments in the future, our current paper evaluates ChatGPT on 7 different tasks, covering 37 diverse languages with high, medium, low, and extremely low resources. We also focus on the zero-shot learning setting for ChatGPT to improve reproducibility and better simulate the interactions of general users. Compared to the performance of previous models, our extensive experimental results demonstrate a worse performance of ChatGPT for different NLP tasks and languages, calling for further research to develop better models and understanding for multilingual learning.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated wide-ranging applications across various fields and have shown significant potential in the academic peer-review process. However, existing applications are primarily limited to static review generation based on submitted papers, which fail to capture the dynamic and iterative nature of real-world peer reviews. In this paper, we reformulate the peer-review process as a multi-turn, long-context dialogue, incorporating distinct roles for authors, reviewers, and decision makers. We construct a comprehensive dataset containing over 26,841 papers with 92,017 reviews collected from multiple sources, including the top-tier conference and prestigious journal. This dataset is meticulously designed to facilitate the applications of LLMs for multi-turn dialogues, effectively simulating the complete peer-review process. Furthermore, we propose a series of metrics to evaluate the performance of LLMs for each role under this reformulated peer-review setting, ensuring fair and comprehensive evaluations. We believe this work provides a promising perspective on enhancing the LLM-driven peer-review process by incorporating dynamic, role-based interactions. It aligns closely with the iterative and interactive nature of real-world academic peer review, offering a robust foundation for future research and development in this area. We open-source the dataset at https://github.com/chengtan9907/ReviewMT.

Conversational LLMs function as black box systems, leaving users guessing about why they see the output they do. This lack of transparency is potentially problematic, especially given concerns around bias and truthfulness. To address this issue, we present an end-to-end prototype-connecting interpretability techniques with user experience design-that seeks to make chatbots more transparent. We begin by showing evidence that a prominent open-source LLM has a "user model": examining the internal state of the system, we can extract data related to a user's age, gender, educational level, and socioeconomic status. Next, we describe the design of a dashboard that accompanies the chatbot interface, displaying this user model in real time. The dashboard can also be used to control the user model and the system's behavior. Finally, we discuss a study in which users conversed with the instrumented system. Our results suggest that users appreciate seeing internal states, which helped them expose biased behavior and increased their sense of control. Participants also made valuable suggestions that point to future directions for both design and machine learning research. The project page and video demo of our TalkTuner system are available at https://bit.ly/talktuner-project-page

The rise of large language models (LLMs) has revolutionized user interactions with knowledge-based systems, enabling chatbots to synthesize vast amounts of information and assist with complex, exploratory tasks. However, LLM-based chatbots often struggle to provide personalized support, particularly when users start with vague queries or lack sufficient contextual information. This paper introduces the Collaborative Assistant for Personalized Exploration (CARE), a system designed to enhance personalization in exploratory tasks by combining a multi-agent LLM framework with a structured user interface. CARE's interface consists of a Chat Panel, Solution Panel, and Needs Panel, enabling iterative query refinement and dynamic solution generation. The multi-agent framework collaborates to identify both explicit and implicit user needs, delivering tailored, actionable solutions. In a within-subject user study with 22 participants, CARE was consistently preferred over a baseline LLM chatbot, with users praising its ability to reduce cognitive load, inspire creativity, and provide more tailored solutions. Our findings highlight CARE's potential to transform LLM-based systems from passive information retrievers to proactive partners in personalized problem-solving and exploration.

Text summarization has been a crucial problem in natural language processing (NLP) for several decades. It aims to condense lengthy documents into shorter versions while retaining the most critical information. Various methods have been proposed for text summarization, including extractive and abstractive summarization. The emergence of large language models (LLMs) like GPT3 and ChatGPT has recently created significant interest in using these models for text summarization tasks. Recent studies goyal2022news, zhang2023benchmarking have shown that LLMs-generated news summaries are already on par with humans. However, the performance of LLMs for more practical applications like aspect or query-based summaries is underexplored. To fill this gap, we conducted an evaluation of ChatGPT's performance on four widely used benchmark datasets, encompassing diverse summaries from Reddit posts, news articles, dialogue meetings, and stories. Our experiments reveal that ChatGPT's performance is comparable to traditional fine-tuning methods in terms of Rouge scores. Moreover, we highlight some unique differences between ChatGPT-generated summaries and human references, providing valuable insights into the superpower of ChatGPT for diverse text summarization tasks. Our findings call for new directions in this area, and we plan to conduct further research to systematically examine the characteristics of ChatGPT-generated summaries through extensive human evaluation.

The emergence of ChatGPT has generated much speculation in the press about its potential to disrupt social and economic systems. Its astonishing language ability has aroused strong curiosity among scholars about its performance in different domains. There have been many studies evaluating the ability of ChatGPT and GPT-4 in different tasks and disciplines. However, a comprehensive review summarizing the collective assessment findings is lacking. The objective of this survey is to thoroughly analyze prior assessments of ChatGPT and GPT-4, focusing on its language and reasoning abilities, scientific knowledge, and ethical considerations. Furthermore, an examination of the existing evaluation methods is conducted, offering several recommendations for future research in evaluating large language models.

Existing English-teaching chatbots rarely incorporate empathy explicitly in their feedback, but empathetic feedback could help keep students engaged and reduce learner anxiety. Toward this end, we propose the task of negative emotion detection via audio, for recognizing empathetic feedback opportunities in language learning. We then build the first spoken English-teaching chatbot with adaptive, empathetic feedback. This feedback is synthesized through automatic prompt optimization of ChatGPT and is evaluated with English learners. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our system through a preliminary user study.

Despite advances in open-domain dialogue systems, automatic evaluation of such systems is still a challenging problem. Traditional reference-based metrics such as BLEU are ineffective because there could be many valid responses for a given context that share no common words with reference responses. A recent work proposed Referenced metric and Unreferenced metric Blended Evaluation Routine (RUBER) to combine a learning-based metric, which predicts relatedness between a generated response and a given query, with reference-based metric; it showed high correlation with human judgments. In this paper, we explore using contextualized word embeddings to compute more accurate relatedness scores, thus better evaluation metrics. Experiments show that our evaluation metrics outperform RUBER, which is trained on static embeddings.

Large language models (LLMs) have performed well in providing general and extensive health suggestions in single-turn conversations, exemplified by systems such as ChatGPT, ChatGLM, ChatDoctor, DoctorGLM, and etc. However, the limited information provided by users during single turn results in inadequate personalization and targeting of the generated suggestions, which requires users to independently select the useful part. It is mainly caused by the missing ability to engage in multi-turn questioning. In real-world medical consultations, doctors usually employ a series of iterative inquiries to comprehend the patient's condition thoroughly, enabling them to provide effective and personalized suggestions subsequently, which can be defined as chain of questioning (CoQ) for LLMs. To improve the CoQ of LLMs, we propose BianQue, a ChatGLM-based LLM finetuned with the self-constructed health conversation dataset BianQueCorpus that is consist of multiple turns of questioning and health suggestions polished by ChatGPT. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed BianQue can simultaneously balance the capabilities of both questioning and health suggestions, which will help promote the research and application of LLMs in the field of proactive health.

Large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT are increasingly being used for various use cases, including text content generation at scale. Although detection methods for such AI-generated text exist already, we investigate ChatGPT's performance as a detector on such AI-generated text, inspired by works that use ChatGPT as a data labeler or annotator. We evaluate the zero-shot performance of ChatGPT in the task of human-written vs. AI-generated text detection, and perform experiments on publicly available datasets. We empirically investigate if ChatGPT is symmetrically effective in detecting AI-generated or human-written text. Our findings provide insight on how ChatGPT and similar LLMs may be leveraged in automated detection pipelines by simply focusing on solving a specific aspect of the problem and deriving the rest from that solution. All code and data is available at https://github.com/AmritaBh/ChatGPT-as-Detector.

ChatGPT is a powerful large language model (LLM) that covers knowledge resources such as Wikipedia and supports natural language question answering using its own knowledge. Therefore, there is growing interest in exploring whether ChatGPT can replace traditional knowledge-based question answering (KBQA) models. Although there have been some works analyzing the question answering performance of ChatGPT, there is still a lack of large-scale, comprehensive testing of various types of complex questions to analyze the limitations of the model. In this paper, we present a framework that follows the black-box testing specifications of CheckList proposed by Ribeiro et. al. We evaluate ChatGPT and its family of LLMs on eight real-world KB-based complex question answering datasets, which include six English datasets and two multilingual datasets. The total number of test cases is approximately 190,000. In addition to the GPT family of LLMs, we also evaluate the well-known FLAN-T5 to identify commonalities between the GPT family and other LLMs. The dataset and code are available at https://github.com/tan92hl/Complex-Question-Answering-Evaluation-of-GPT-family.git

Knowing how to end and resume conversations over time is a natural part of communication, allowing for discussions to span weeks, months, or years. The duration of gaps between conversations dictates which topics are relevant and which questions to ask, and dialogue systems which do not explicitly model time may generate responses that are unnatural. In this work we explore the idea of making dialogue models aware of time, and present GapChat, a multi-session dialogue dataset in which the time between each session varies. While the dataset is constructed in real-time, progress on events in speakers' lives is simulated in order to create realistic dialogues occurring across a long timespan. We expose time information to the model and compare different representations of time and event progress. In human evaluation we show that time-aware models perform better in metrics that judge the relevance of the chosen topics and the information gained from the conversation.

The Interactive Knowledge Assistant Track (iKAT) 2024 focuses on advancing conversational assistants, able to adapt their interaction and responses from personalized user knowledge. The track incorporates a Personal Textual Knowledge Base (PTKB) alongside Conversational AI tasks, such as passage ranking and response generation. Query Rewrite being an effective approach for resolving conversational context, we explore Large Language Models (LLMs), as query rewriters. Specifically, our submitted runs explore multi-aspect query generation using the MQ4CS framework, which we further enhance with Learned Sparse Retrieval via the SPLADE architecture, coupled with robust cross-encoder models. We also propose an alternative to the previous interleaving strategy, aggregating multiple aspects during the reranking phase. Our findings indicate that multi-aspect query generation is effective in enhancing performance when integrated with advanced retrieval and reranking models. Our results also lead the way for better personalization in Conversational Search, relying on LLMs to integrate personalization within query rewrite, and outperforming human rewrite performance.

One of the most challenging problems facing NLP today is evaluation. Some of the most pressing issues pertain to benchmark saturation, data contamination, and diversity in the quality of test examples. To address these concerns, we propose Selection Methodology for Accurate, Reduced, and Targeted (SMART) filtering, a novel approach to select a high-quality subset of examples from existing benchmark datasets by systematically removing less informative and less challenging examples. Our approach applies three filtering criteria, removing (i) easy examples, (ii) data-contaminated examples, and (iii) examples that are similar to each other based on distance in an embedding space. We demonstrate the effectiveness of SMART on three multiple choice QA datasets, where our methodology increases efficiency by reducing dataset size by 48\% on average, while increasing Pearson correlation with rankings from ChatBot Arena, a more open-ended human evaluation setting. Our method enables us to be more efficient, whether using SMART to make new benchmarks more challenging or to revitalize older datasets, while still preserving the relative model rankings.

The success of task-oriented and document-grounded dialogue systems depends on users accepting and enjoying using them. To achieve this, recently published work in the field of Human-Computer Interaction suggests that the combination of considering demographic information, user emotions and learning from the implicit feedback in their utterances, is particularly important. However, these findings have not yet been transferred to the field of Natural Language Processing, where these data are primarily studied separately. Accordingly, no sufficiently annotated dataset is available. To address this gap, we introduce FEDI, the first English dialogue dataset for task-oriented document-grounded dialogues annotated with demographic information, user emotions and implicit feedback. Our experiments with FLAN-T5, GPT-2 and LLaMA-2 show that these data have the potential to improve task completion and the factual consistency of the generated responses and user acceptance.

The long-standing one-to-many problem of gold standard responses in open-domain dialogue systems presents challenges for automatic evaluation metrics. Though prior works have demonstrated some success by applying powerful Large Language Models (LLMs), existing approaches still struggle with the one-to-many problem, and exhibit subpar performance in domain-specific scenarios. We assume the commonsense reasoning biases within LLMs may hinder their performance in domainspecific evaluations. To address both issues, we propose a novel framework SLIDE (Small and Large Integrated for Dialogue Evaluation), that leverages both a small, specialised model (SLM), and LLMs for the evaluation of open domain dialogues. Our approach introduces several techniques: (1) Contrastive learning to differentiate between robust and non-robust response embeddings; (2) A novel metric for semantic sensitivity that combines embedding cosine distances with similarity learned through neural networks, and (3) a strategy for incorporating the evaluation results from both the SLM and LLMs. Our empirical results demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance in both the classification and evaluation tasks, and additionally the SLIDE evaluator exhibits better correlation with human judgements. Our code is available at https:// github.com/hegehongcha/SLIDE-ACL2024.

This paper presents UMASS_BioNLP team participation in the MEDIQA-Chat 2023 shared task for Task-A and Task-C. We focus especially on Task-C and propose a novel LLMs cooperation system named a doctor-patient loop to generate high-quality conversation data sets. The experiment results demonstrate that our approaches yield reasonable performance as evaluated by automatic metrics such as ROUGE, medical concept recall, BLEU, and Self-BLEU. Furthermore, we conducted a comparative analysis between our proposed method and ChatGPT and GPT-4. This analysis also investigates the potential of utilizing cooperation LLMs to generate high-quality datasets.

Emotional Support Conversation (ESC) is a typical dialogue that can effectively assist the user in mitigating emotional pressures. However, owing to the inherent subjectivity involved in analyzing emotions, current non-artificial methodologies face challenges in effectively appraising the emotional support capability. These metrics exhibit a low correlation with human judgments. Concurrently, manual evaluation methods extremely will cause high costs. To solve these problems, we propose a novel model FEEL (Framework for Evaluating Emotional Support Capability with Large Lan-guage Models), employing Large Language Models (LLMs) as evaluators to assess emotional support capabilities. The model meticulously considers various evaluative aspects of ESC to apply a more comprehensive and accurate evaluation method for ESC. Additionally, it employs a probability distribution approach for a more stable result and integrates an ensemble learning strategy, leveraging multiple LLMs with assigned weights to enhance evaluation accuracy. To appraise the performance of FEEL, we conduct extensive experiments on existing ESC model dialogues. Experimental results demonstrate our model exhibits a substantial enhancement in alignment with human evaluations compared to the baselines. Our source code is available at https://github.com/Ansisy/FEEL.

Over the past decade, predictive language modeling for code has proven to be a valuable tool for enabling new forms of automation for developers. More recently, we have seen the advent of general purpose "large language models", based on neural transformer architectures, that have been trained on massive datasets of human written text spanning code and natural language. However, despite the demonstrated representational power of such models, interacting with them has historically been constrained to specific task settings, limiting their general applicability. Many of these limitations were recently overcome with the introduction of ChatGPT, a language model created by OpenAI and trained to operate as a conversational agent, enabling it to answer questions and respond to a wide variety of commands from end users. The introduction of models, such as ChatGPT, has already spurred fervent discussion from educators, ranging from fear that students could use these AI tools to circumvent learning, to excitement about the new types of learning opportunities that they might unlock. However, given the nascent nature of these tools, we currently lack fundamental knowledge related to how well they perform in different educational settings, and the potential promise (or danger) that they might pose to traditional forms of instruction. As such, in this paper, we examine how well ChatGPT performs when tasked with answering common questions in a popular software testing curriculum. Our findings indicate that ChatGPT can provide correct or partially correct answers in 55.6% of cases, provide correct or partially correct explanations of answers in 53.0% of cases, and that prompting the tool in a shared question context leads to a marginally higher rate of correct responses. Based on these findings, we discuss the potential promises and perils related to the use of ChatGPT by students and instructors.

Traditional dialog systems used in goal-oriented applications require a lot of domain-specific handcrafting, which hinders scaling up to new domains. End-to-end dialog systems, in which all components are trained from the dialogs themselves, escape this limitation. But the encouraging success recently obtained in chit-chat dialog may not carry over to goal-oriented settings. This paper proposes a testbed to break down the strengths and shortcomings of end-to-end dialog systems in goal-oriented applications. Set in the context of restaurant reservation, our tasks require manipulating sentences and symbols, so as to properly conduct conversations, issue API calls and use the outputs of such calls. We show that an end-to-end dialog system based on Memory Networks can reach promising, yet imperfect, performance and learn to perform non-trivial operations. We confirm those results by comparing our system to a hand-crafted slot-filling baseline on data from the second Dialog State Tracking Challenge (Henderson et al., 2014a). We show similar result patterns on data extracted from an online concierge service.

Human feedback data is a critical component in developing language models. However, collecting this feedback is costly and ultimately not scalable. We propose a scalable method for extracting feedback that users naturally include when interacting with chat models, and leveraging it for model training. We are further motivated by previous work that showed there are also qualitative advantages to using naturalistic (rather than auto-generated) feedback, such as less hallucinations and biases. We manually annotated conversation data to confirm the presence of naturally occurring feedback in a standard corpus, finding that as much as 30% of the chats include explicit feedback. We apply our method to over 1M conversations to obtain hundreds of thousands of feedback samples. Training with the extracted feedback shows significant performance improvements over baseline models, demonstrating the efficacy of our approach in enhancing model alignment to human preferences.

In this paper, we introduce the first evaluation of Chinese human-computer dialogue technology. We detail the evaluation scheme, tasks, metrics and how to collect and annotate the data for training, developing and test. The evaluation includes two tasks, namely user intent classification and online testing of task-oriented dialogue. To consider the different sources of the data for training and developing, the first task can also be divided into two sub tasks. Both the two tasks are coming from the real problems when using the applications developed by industry. The evaluation data is provided by the iFLYTEK Corporation. Meanwhile, in this paper, we publish the evaluation results to present the current performance of the participants in the two tasks of Chinese human-computer dialogue technology. Moreover, we analyze the existing problems of human-computer dialogue as well as the evaluation scheme itself.

Large Language Models (LLMs) offer numerous applications, the full extent of which is not yet understood. This paper investigates if LLMs can be applied for editing structured and semi-structured documents with minimal effort. Using a qualitative research approach, we conduct two case studies with ChatGPT and thoroughly analyze the results. Our experiments indicate that LLMs can effectively edit structured and semi-structured documents when provided with basic, straightforward prompts. ChatGPT demonstrates a strong ability to recognize and process the structure of annotated documents. This suggests that explicitly structuring tasks and data in prompts might enhance an LLM's ability to understand and solve tasks. Furthermore, the experiments also reveal impressive pattern matching skills in ChatGPT. This observation deserves further investigation, as it may contribute to understanding the processes leading to hallucinations in LLMs.

Researchers have successfully applied large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT to reranking in an information retrieval context, but to date, such work has mostly been built on proprietary models hidden behind opaque API endpoints. This approach yields experimental results that are not reproducible and non-deterministic, threatening the veracity of outcomes that build on such shaky foundations. To address this significant shortcoming, we present RankVicuna, the first fully open-source LLM capable of performing high-quality listwise reranking in a zero-shot setting. Experimental results on the TREC 2019 and 2020 Deep Learning Tracks show that we can achieve effectiveness comparable to zero-shot reranking with GPT-3.5 with a much smaller 7B parameter model, although our effectiveness remains slightly behind reranking with GPT-4. We hope our work provides the foundation for future research on reranking with modern LLMs. All the code necessary to reproduce our results is available at https://github.com/castorini/rank_llm.

Chit-chat models are known to have several problems: they lack specificity, do not display a consistent personality and are often not very captivating. In this work we present the task of making chit-chat more engaging by conditioning on profile information. We collect data and train models to (i) condition on their given profile information; and (ii) information about the person they are talking to, resulting in improved dialogues, as measured by next utterance prediction. Since (ii) is initially unknown our model is trained to engage its partner with personal topics, and we show the resulting dialogue can be used to predict profile information about the interlocutors.

Recent advancements in conversational AI have created an urgent need for safety guardrails that prevent users from being exposed to offensive and dangerous content. Much of this work relies on human ratings and feedback, but does not account for the fact that perceptions of offense and safety are inherently subjective and that there may be systematic disagreements between raters that align with their socio-demographic identities. Instead, current machine learning approaches largely ignore rater subjectivity and use gold standards that obscure disagreements (e.g., through majority voting). In order to better understand the socio-cultural leanings of such tasks, we propose a comprehensive disagreement analysis framework to measure systematic diversity in perspectives among different rater subgroups. We then demonstrate its utility by applying this framework to a dataset of human-chatbot conversations rated by a demographically diverse pool of raters. Our analysis reveals specific rater groups that have more diverse perspectives than the rest, and informs demographic axes that are crucial to consider for safety annotations.

Great successes have been reported using Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) to align large language models. Open-source preference datasets and reward models have enabled wider experimentation beyond generic chat settings, particularly to make systems more "helpful" for tasks like web question answering, summarization, and multi-turn dialogue. When optimizing for helpfulness, RLHF has been consistently observed to drive models to produce longer outputs. This paper demonstrates that optimizing for response length is a significant factor behind RLHF's reported improvements in these settings. First, we study the relationship between reward and length for reward models trained on three open-source preference datasets for helpfulness. Here, length correlates strongly with reward, and improvements in reward score are driven in large part by shifting the distribution over output lengths. We then explore interventions during both RL and reward model learning to see if we can achieve the same downstream improvements as RLHF without increasing length. While our interventions mitigate length increases, they aren't uniformly effective across settings. Furthermore, we find that even running RLHF with a reward based solely on length can reproduce most of the downstream improvements over the initial policy model, showing that reward models in these settings have a long way to go.

This study examines the performance of open-source Large Language Models (LLMs) in text annotation tasks and compares it with proprietary models like ChatGPT and human-based services such as MTurk. While prior research demonstrated the high performance of ChatGPT across numerous NLP tasks, open-source LLMs like HugginChat and FLAN are gaining attention for their cost-effectiveness, transparency, reproducibility, and superior data protection. We assess these models using both zero-shot and few-shot approaches and different temperature parameters across a range of text annotation tasks. Our findings show that while ChatGPT achieves the best performance in most tasks, open-source LLMs not only outperform MTurk but also demonstrate competitive potential against ChatGPT in specific tasks.

As LLMs evolve on a daily basis, there is an urgent need for a trustworthy evaluation method that can provide robust evaluation results in a timely fashion. Currently, as static benchmarks are prone to contamination concerns, users tend to trust human voting platforms, such as Chatbot Arena. However, human annotations require extensive manual efforts. To provide an automatic, robust, and trustworthy evaluation framework, we innovatively propose the Auto-Arena of LLMs, which automates the entire evaluation process with LLM agents. Firstly, an examiner LLM devises queries. Then, a pair of candidate LLMs engage in a multi-round peer-battle around the query, during which the LLM's true performance gaps become visible. Finally, a committee of LLM judges collectively discuss and determine the winner, which alleviates bias and promotes fairness. In our extensive experiment on the 17 newest LLMs, Auto-Arena shows the highest correlation with human preferences, providing a promising alternative to human evaluation platforms.

In this paper, we introduce a comprehensive benchmark for Persian (Farsi) text embeddings, built upon the Massive Text Embedding Benchmark (MTEB). Our benchmark includes 63 datasets spanning seven different tasks: classification, clustering, pair classification, reranking, retrieval, summary retrieval, and semantic textual similarity. The datasets are formed as a combination of existing, translated, and newly generated data, offering a diverse evaluation framework for Persian language models. Given the increasing use of text embedding models in chatbots, evaluation datasets are becoming inseparable ingredients in chatbot challenges and Retrieval-Augmented Generation systems. As a contribution, we include chatbot evaluation datasets in the MTEB benchmark for the first time. In addition, in this paper, we introduce the new task of summary retrieval which is not part of the tasks included in standard MTEB. Another contribution of this paper is the introduction of a substantial number of new Persian language NLP datasets suitable for training and evaluation, some of which have no previous counterparts in Persian. We evaluate the performance of several Persian and multilingual embedding models in a range of tasks. This work introduces an open-source benchmark with datasets, code and a public leaderboard.

Despite recent progress in open-domain dialogue evaluation, how to develop automatic metrics remains an open problem. We explore the potential of dialogue evaluation featuring dialog act information, which was hardly explicitly modeled in previous methods. However, defined at the utterance level in general, dialog act is of coarse granularity, as an utterance can contain multiple segments possessing different functions. Hence, we propose segment act, an extension of dialog act from utterance level to segment level, and crowdsource a large-scale dataset for it. To utilize segment act flows, sequences of segment acts, for evaluation, we develop the first consensus-based dialogue evaluation framework, FlowEval. This framework provides a reference-free approach for dialog evaluation by finding pseudo-references. Extensive experiments against strong baselines on three benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and other desirable characteristics of our FlowEval, pointing out a potential path for better dialogue evaluation.

Conversational recommender systems (CRS) aim to recommend relevant items to users by eliciting user preference through natural language conversation. Prior work often utilizes external knowledge graphs for items' semantic information, a language model for dialogue generation, and a recommendation module for ranking relevant items. This combination of multiple components suffers from a cumbersome training process, and leads to semantic misalignment issues between dialogue generation and item recommendation. In this paper, we represent items in natural language and formulate CRS as a natural language processing task. Accordingly, we leverage the power of pre-trained language models to encode items, understand user intent via conversation, perform item recommendation through semantic matching, and generate dialogues. As a unified model, our PECRS (Parameter-Efficient CRS), can be optimized in a single stage, without relying on non-textual metadata such as a knowledge graph. Experiments on two benchmark CRS datasets, ReDial and INSPIRED, demonstrate the effectiveness of PECRS on recommendation and conversation. Our code is available at: https://github.com/Ravoxsg/efficient_unified_crs.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have quickly become an invaluable assistant for a variety of tasks. However, their effectiveness is constrained by their ability to tailor responses to human preferences and behaviors via personalization. Prior work in LLM personalization has largely focused on style transfer or incorporating small factoids about the user, as knowledge injection remains an open challenge. In this paper, we explore injecting knowledge of prior conversations into LLMs to enable future work on less redundant, personalized conversations. We identify two real-world constraints: (1) conversations are sequential in time and must be treated as such during training, and (2) per-user personalization is only viable in parameter-efficient settings. To this aim, we propose PLUM, a pipeline performing data augmentation for up-sampling conversations as question-answer pairs, that are then used to finetune a low-rank adaptation adapter with a weighted cross entropy loss. Even in this first exploration of the problem, we perform competitively with baselines such as RAG, attaining an accuracy of 81.5% across 100 conversations.

The Conversational Assistance Track (CAsT) is a new track for TREC 2019 to facilitate Conversational Information Seeking (CIS) research and to create a large-scale reusable test collection for conversational search systems. The document corpus is 38,426,252 passages from the TREC Complex Answer Retrieval (CAR) and Microsoft MAchine Reading COmprehension (MARCO) datasets. Eighty information seeking dialogues (30 train, 50 test) are an average of 9 to 10 questions long. Relevance assessments are provided for 30 training topics and 20 test topics. This year 21 groups submitted a total of 65 runs using varying methods for conversational query understanding and ranking. Methods include traditional retrieval based methods, feature based learning-to-rank, neural models, and knowledge enhanced methods. A common theme through the runs is the use of BERT-based neural reranking methods. Leading methods also employed document expansion, conversational query expansion, and generative language models for conversational query rewriting (GPT-2). The results show a gap between automatic systems and those using the manually resolved utterances, with a 35% relative improvement of manual rewrites over the best automatic system.

The recent development of generative and large language models (LLMs) poses new challenges for model evaluation that the research community and industry are grappling with. While the versatile capabilities of these models ignite excitement, they also inevitably make a leap toward homogenization: powering a wide range of applications with a single, often referred to as ``general-purpose'', model. In this position paper, we argue that model evaluation practices must take on a critical task to cope with the challenges and responsibilities brought by this homogenization: providing valid assessments for whether and how much human needs in downstream use cases can be satisfied by the given model (socio-technical gap). By drawing on lessons from the social sciences, human-computer interaction (HCI), and the interdisciplinary field of explainable AI (XAI), we urge the community to develop evaluation methods based on real-world socio-requirements and embrace diverse evaluation methods with an acknowledgment of trade-offs between realism to socio-requirements and pragmatic costs to conduct the evaluation. By mapping HCI and current NLG evaluation methods, we identify opportunities for evaluation methods for LLMs to narrow the socio-technical gap and pose open questions.

Millions of people participate in online peer-to-peer support sessions, yet there has been little prior research on systematic psychology-based evaluations of fine-grained peer-counselor behavior in relation to client satisfaction. This paper seeks to bridge this gap by mapping peer-counselor chat-messages to motivational interviewing (MI) techniques. We annotate 14,797 utterances from 734 chat conversations using 17 MI techniques and introduce four new interviewing codes such as chit-chat and inappropriate to account for the unique conversational patterns observed on online platforms. We automate the process of labeling peer-counselor responses to MI techniques by fine-tuning large domain-specific language models and then use these automated measures to investigate the behavior of the peer counselors via correlational studies. Specifically, we study the impact of MI techniques on the conversation ratings to investigate the techniques that predict clients' satisfaction with their counseling sessions. When counselors use techniques such as reflection and affirmation, clients are more satisfied. Examining volunteer counselors' change in usage of techniques suggest that counselors learn to use more introduction and open questions as they gain experience. This work provides a deeper understanding of the use of motivational interviewing techniques on peer-to-peer counselor platforms and sheds light on how to build better training programs for volunteer counselors on online platforms.

Recommendation dialogue systems aim to build social bonds with users and provide high-quality recommendations. This paper pushes forward towards a promising paradigm called target-driven recommendation dialogue systems, which is highly desired yet under-explored. We focus on how to naturally lead users to accept the designated targets gradually through conversations. To this end, we propose a Target-driven Conversation Planning (TCP) framework to plan a sequence of dialogue actions and topics, driving the system to transit between different conversation stages proactively. We then apply our TCP with planned content to guide dialogue generation. Experimental results show that our conversation planning significantly improves the performance of target-driven recommendation dialogue systems.

Recent breakthroughs in natural language processing (NLP) have permitted the synthesis and comprehension of coherent text in an open-ended way, therefore translating the theoretical algorithms into practical applications. The large language models (LLMs) have significantly impacted businesses such as report summarization software and copywriters. Observations indicate, however, that LLMs may exhibit social prejudice and toxicity, posing ethical and societal dangers of consequences resulting from irresponsibility. Large-scale benchmarks for accountable LLMs should consequently be developed. Although several empirical investigations reveal the existence of a few ethical difficulties in advanced LLMs, there is little systematic examination and user study of the risks and harmful behaviors of current LLM usage. To further educate future efforts on constructing ethical LLMs responsibly, we perform a qualitative research method called ``red teaming'' on OpenAI's ChatGPTIn this paper, ChatGPT refers to the version released on Dec 15th. to better understand the practical features of ethical dangers in recent LLMs. We analyze ChatGPT comprehensively from four perspectives: 1) Bias 2) Reliability 3) Robustness 4) Toxicity. In accordance with our stated viewpoints, we empirically benchmark ChatGPT on multiple sample datasets. We find that a significant number of ethical risks cannot be addressed by existing benchmarks, and hence illustrate them via additional case studies. In addition, we examine the implications of our findings on AI ethics and harmal behaviors of ChatGPT, as well as future problems and practical design considerations for responsible LLMs. We believe that our findings may give light on future efforts to determine and mitigate the ethical hazards posed by machines in LLM applications.

Chatbots such as GPT-4 and ChatGPT are now serving millions of users. Despite their widespread use, there remains a lack of public datasets showcasing how these tools are used by a population of users in practice. To bridge this gap, we offered free access to ChatGPT for online users in exchange for their affirmative, consensual opt-in to anonymously collect their chat transcripts and request headers. From this, we compiled WildChat, a corpus of 1 million user-ChatGPT conversations, which consists of over 2.5 million interaction turns. We compare WildChat with other popular user-chatbot interaction datasets, and find that our dataset offers the most diverse user prompts, contains the largest number of languages, and presents the richest variety of potentially toxic use-cases for researchers to study. In addition to timestamped chat transcripts, we enrich the dataset with demographic data, including state, country, and hashed IP addresses, alongside request headers. This augmentation allows for more detailed analysis of user behaviors across different geographical regions and temporal dimensions. Finally, because it captures a broad range of use cases, we demonstrate the dataset's potential utility in fine-tuning instruction-following models. WildChat is released at https://wildchat.allen.ai under AI2 ImpACT Licenses.

We propose MemoChat, a pipeline for refining instructions that enables large language models (LLMs) to effectively employ self-composed memos for maintaining consistent long-range open-domain conversations. We demonstrate a long-range open-domain conversation through iterative "memorization-retrieval-response" cycles. This requires us to carefully design tailored tuning instructions for each distinct stage. The instructions are reconstructed from a collection of public datasets to teach the LLMs to memorize and retrieve past dialogues with structured memos, leading to enhanced consistency when participating in future conversations. We invite experts to manually annotate a test set designed to evaluate the consistency of long-range conversations questions. Experiments on three testing scenarios involving both open-source and API-accessible chatbots at scale verify the efficacy of MemoChat, which outperforms strong baselines. Our codes, data and models are available here: https://github.com/LuJunru/MemoChat.

Evaluating large language models (LLMs) is challenging. Traditional ground-truth-based benchmarks fail to capture the comprehensiveness and nuance of real-world queries, while LLM-as-judge benchmarks suffer from grading biases and limited query quantity. Both of them may also become contaminated over time. User-facing evaluation, such as Chatbot Arena, provides reliable signals but is costly and slow. In this work, we propose MixEval, a new paradigm for establishing efficient, gold-standard LLM evaluation by strategically mixing off-the-shelf benchmarks. It bridges (1) comprehensive and well-distributed real-world user queries and (2) efficient and fairly-graded ground-truth-based benchmarks, by matching queries mined from the web with similar queries from existing benchmarks. Based on MixEval, we further build MixEval-Hard, which offers more room for model improvement. Our benchmarks' advantages lie in (1) a 0.96 model ranking correlation with Chatbot Arena arising from the highly impartial query distribution and grading mechanism, (2) fast, cheap, and reproducible execution (6% of the time and cost of MMLU), and (3) dynamic evaluation enabled by the rapid and stable data update pipeline. We provide extensive meta-evaluation and analysis for our and existing LLM benchmarks to deepen the community's understanding of LLM evaluation and guide future research directions.

While language model (LM)-powered chatbots and generative search engines excel at answering concrete queries, discovering information in the terrain of unknown unknowns remains challenging for users. To emulate the common educational scenario where children/students learn by listening to and participating in conversations of their parents/teachers, we create Collaborative STORM (Co-STORM). Unlike QA systems that require users to ask all the questions, Co-STORM lets users observe and occasionally steer the discourse among several LM agents. The agents ask questions on the user's behalf, allowing the user to discover unknown unknowns serendipitously. To facilitate user interaction, Co-STORM assists users in tracking the discourse by organizing the uncovered information into a dynamic mind map, ultimately generating a comprehensive report as takeaways. For automatic evaluation, we construct the WildSeek dataset by collecting real information-seeking records with user goals. Co-STORM outperforms baseline methods on both discourse trace and report quality. In a further human evaluation, 70% of participants prefer Co-STORM over a search engine, and 78% favor it over a RAG chatbot.

Human evaluation is the foundation upon which the evaluation of both summarization systems and automatic metrics rests. However, existing human evaluation studies for summarization either exhibit a low inter-annotator agreement or have insufficient scale, and an in-depth analysis of human evaluation is lacking. Therefore, we address the shortcomings of existing summarization evaluation along the following axes: (1) We propose a modified summarization salience protocol, Atomic Content Units (ACUs), which is based on fine-grained semantic units and allows for a high inter-annotator agreement. (2) We curate the Robust Summarization Evaluation (RoSE) benchmark, a large human evaluation dataset consisting of 22,000 summary-level annotations over 28 top-performing systems on three datasets. (3) We conduct a comparative study of four human evaluation protocols, underscoring potential confounding factors in evaluation setups. (4) We evaluate 50 automatic metrics and their variants using the collected human annotations across evaluation protocols and demonstrate how our benchmark leads to more statistically stable and significant results. The metrics we benchmarked include recent methods based on large language models (LLMs), GPTScore and G-Eval. Furthermore, our findings have important implications for evaluating LLMs, as we show that LLMs adjusted by human feedback (e.g., GPT-3.5) may overfit unconstrained human evaluation, which is affected by the annotators' prior, input-agnostic preferences, calling for more robust, targeted evaluation methods.

We study the limitations of Large Language Models (LLMs) for the task of response generation in human-machine dialogue. Several techniques have been proposed in the literature for different dialogue types (e.g., Open-Domain). However, the evaluations of these techniques have been limited in terms of base LLMs, dialogue types and evaluation metrics. In this work, we extensively analyze different LLM adaptation techniques when applied to different dialogue types. We have selected two base LLMs, Llama-2 and Mistral, and four dialogue types Open-Domain, Knowledge-Grounded, Task-Oriented, and Question Answering. We evaluate the performance of in-context learning and fine-tuning techniques across datasets selected for each dialogue type. We assess the impact of incorporating external knowledge to ground the generation in both scenarios of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and gold knowledge. We adopt consistent evaluation and explainability criteria for automatic metrics and human evaluation protocols. Our analysis shows that there is no universal best-technique for adapting large language models as the efficacy of each technique depends on both the base LLM and the specific type of dialogue. Last but not least, the assessment of the best adaptation technique should include human evaluation to avoid false expectations and outcomes derived from automatic metrics.

In task-oriented conversational AI evaluation, unsupervised methods poorly correlate with human judgments, and supervised approaches lack generalization. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) show robust zeroshot and few-shot capabilities across NLP tasks. This paper explores using LLMs for automated dialogue quality evaluation, experimenting with various configurations on public and proprietary datasets. Manipulating factors such as model size, in-context examples, and selection techniques, we examine "chain-of-thought" (CoT) reasoning and label extraction procedures. Our results show that (1) larger models yield more accurate dialogue labels; (2) algorithmic selection of in-context examples outperforms random selection; (3) CoT reasoning where an LLM is asked to provide justifications before outputting final labels improves performance; and (4) fine-tuned LLMs outperform out-of-the-box ones. Our results indicate that LLMs that are suitably fine-tuned and have sufficient reasoning capabilities can be leveraged for automated dialogue evaluation.

Recent advances in interactive large language models like ChatGPT have revolutionized various domains; however, their behavior in natural and role-play conversation settings remains underexplored. In our study, we address this gap by deeply investigating how ChatGPT behaves during conversations in different settings by analyzing its interactions in both a normal way and a role-play setting. We introduce a novel dataset of broad range of human-AI conversations annotated with user motives and model naturalness to examine (i) how humans engage with the conversational AI model, and (ii) how natural are AI model responses. Our study highlights the diversity of user motives when interacting with ChatGPT and variable AI naturalness, showing not only the nuanced dynamics of natural conversations between humans and AI, but also providing new avenues for improving the effectiveness of human-AI communication.

Progress in Machine Learning is often driven by the availability of large datasets, and consistent evaluation metrics for comparing modeling approaches. To this end, we present a repository of conversational datasets consisting of hundreds of millions of examples, and a standardised evaluation procedure for conversational response selection models using '1-of-100 accuracy'. The repository contains scripts that allow researchers to reproduce the standard datasets, or to adapt the pre-processing and data filtering steps to their needs. We introduce and evaluate several competitive baselines for conversational response selection, whose implementations are shared in the repository, as well as a neural encoder model that is trained on the entire training set.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), suicide was the fourth leading cause of death in the world for individuals aged 15 to 29 in 2019. Given the rapid increase in mental health issues, providing psychological support is both crucial and urgent. In this paper: (1) we propose S\'olo Esc\'uchame, the first open-source Spanish emotional assistance chatbot, based on LLaMA-2-7b-Chat. (2) We introduced the HEAR (Hispanic Emotional Accompaniment Responses) dataset, compiled from multiple English sources translated into Spanish, as well as generic data generated using ChatGPT-3.5-Turbo. Finally, (3) we propose an evaluation metric based on two semi-automatic assessment methods. Our system outperforms a range of state-of-the-art models in providing psychological assistance in Spanish. Our models and datasets are publicly available to facilitate reproducibility.

Proactive dialogue systems aim to empower chatbots with the capability of leading conversations towards specific targets, thereby enhancing user engagement and service autonomy. Existing systems typically target pre-defined keywords or entities, neglecting user attributes and preferences implicit in dialogue history, hindering the development of long-term user intimacy. To address these challenges, we take a radical step towards building a more human-like conversational agent by integrating proactive dialogue systems with long-term memory into a unified framework. Specifically, we define a novel task named Memory-aware Proactive Dialogue (MapDia). By decomposing the task, we then propose an automatic data construction method and create the first Chinese Memory-aware Proactive Dataset (ChMapData). Furthermore, we introduce a joint framework based on Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), featuring three modules: Topic Summarization, Topic Retrieval, and Proactive Topic-shifting Detection and Generation, designed to steer dialogues towards relevant historical topics at the right time. The effectiveness of our dataset and models is validated through both automatic and human evaluations. We release the open-source framework and dataset at https://github.com/FrontierLabs/MapDia.

Large Language Models (LLMs) has shown exceptional capabilities in many natual language understanding and generation tasks. However, the personalization issue still remains a much-coveted property, especially when it comes to the multiple sources involved in the dialogue system. To better plan and incorporate the use of multiple sources in generating personalized response, we firstly decompose it into three sub-tasks: Knowledge Source Selection, Knowledge Retrieval, and Response Generation. We then propose a novel Unified Multi-Source Retrieval-Augmented Generation system (UniMS-RAG) Specifically, we unify these three sub-tasks with different formulations into the same sequence-to-sequence paradigm during the training, to adaptively retrieve evidences and evaluate the relevance on-demand using special tokens, called acting tokens and evaluation tokens. Enabling language models to generate acting tokens facilitates interaction with various knowledge sources, allowing them to adapt their behavior to diverse task requirements. Meanwhile, evaluation tokens gauge the relevance score between the dialogue context and the retrieved evidence. In addition, we carefully design a self-refinement mechanism to iteratively refine the generated response considering 1) the consistency scores between the generated response and retrieved evidence; and 2) the relevance scores. Experiments on two personalized datasets (DuLeMon and KBP) show that UniMS-RAG achieves state-of-the-art performance on the knowledge source selection and response generation task with itself as a retriever in a unified manner. Extensive analyses and discussions are provided for shedding some new perspectives for personalized dialogue systems.

We report the results of DialogSum Challenge, the shared task on summarizing real-life scenario dialogues at INLG 2022. Four teams participate in this shared task and three submit their system reports, exploring different methods to improve the performance of dialogue summarization. Although there is a great improvement over the baseline models regarding automatic evaluation metrics, such as Rouge scores, we find that there is a salient gap between model generated outputs and human annotated summaries by human evaluation from multiple aspects. These findings demonstrate the difficulty of dialogue summarization and suggest that more fine-grained evaluatuion metrics are in need.

We present ALT (ALignment with Textual feedback), an approach that aligns language models with user preferences expressed in text. We argue that text offers greater expressiveness, enabling users to provide richer feedback than simple comparative preferences and this richer feedback can lead to more efficient and effective alignment. ALT aligns the model by conditioning its generation on the textual feedback. Our method relies solely on language modeling techniques and requires minimal hyper-parameter tuning, though it still presents the main benefits of RL-based alignment algorithms and can effectively learn from textual feedback. We explore the efficacy and efficiency of textual feedback across different tasks such as toxicity reduction, summarization, and dialog response generation. We find that ALT outperforms PPO for the task of toxicity reduction while being able to match its performance on summarization with only 20% of the samples. We also explore how ALT can be used with feedback provided by an existing LLM where we explore an LLM providing constrained and unconstrained textual feedback. We also outline future directions to align models with natural language feedback.

Linear programming (LP) problems are pervasive in real-life applications. However, despite their apparent simplicity, an untrained user may find it difficult to determine the linear model of their specific problem. We envisage the creation of a goal-oriented conversational agent that will engage in conversation with the user to elicit all information required so that a subsequent agent can generate the linear model. In this paper, we present an approach for the generation of sample dialogues that can be used to develop and train such a conversational agent. Using prompt engineering, we develop two agents that "talk" to each other, one acting as the conversational agent, and the other acting as the user. Using a set of text descriptions of linear problems from NL4Opt available to the user only, the agent and the user engage in conversation until the agent has retrieved all key information from the original problem description. We also propose an extrinsic evaluation of the dialogues by assessing how well the summaries generated by the dialogues match the original problem descriptions. We conduct human and automatic evaluations, including an evaluation approach that uses GPT-4 to mimic the human evaluation metrics. The evaluation results show an overall good quality of the dialogues, though research is still needed to improve the quality of the GPT-4 evaluation metrics. The resulting dialogues, including the human annotations of a subset, are available to the research community. The conversational agent used for the generation of the dialogues can be used as a baseline.

This paper proposes a chatbot framework that adopts a hybrid model which consists of a knowledge graph and a text similarity model. Based on this chatbot framework, we build HHH, an online question-and-answer (QA) Healthcare Helper system for answering complex medical questions. HHH maintains a knowledge graph constructed from medical data collected from the Internet. HHH also implements a novel text representation and similarity deep learning model, Hierarchical BiLSTM Attention Model (HBAM), to find the most similar question from a large QA dataset. We compare HBAM with other state-of-the-art language models such as bidirectional encoder representation from transformers (BERT) and Manhattan LSTM Model (MaLSTM). We train and test the models with a subset of the Quora duplicate questions dataset in the medical area. The experimental results show that our model is able to achieve a superior performance than these existing methods.

We introduce GODEL (Grounded Open Dialogue Language Model), a large pre-trained language model for dialog. In contrast with earlier models such as DialoGPT, GODEL leverages a new phase of grounded pre-training designed to better support adapting GODEL to a wide range of downstream dialog tasks that require information external to the current conversation (e.g., a database or document) to produce good responses. Experiments against an array of benchmarks that encompass task-oriented dialog, conversational QA, and grounded open-domain dialog show that GODEL outperforms state-of-the-art pre-trained dialog models in few-shot fine-tuning setups, in terms of both human and automatic evaluation. A novel feature of our evaluation methodology is the introduction of a notion of utility that assesses the usefulness of responses (extrinsic evaluation) in addition to their communicative features (intrinsic evaluation). We show that extrinsic evaluation offers improved inter-annotator agreement and correlation with automated metrics. Code and data processing scripts are publicly available.

With the rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) and their ubiquitous deployment in diverse domains, measuring language model behavior on realistic data is imperative. For example, a company deploying a client-facing chatbot must ensure that the model will not respond to client requests with profanity. Current evaluations approach this problem using small, domain-specific datasets with human-curated labels. These evaluation sets are often sampled from a narrow and simplified distribution, and data sources can unknowingly be leaked into the training set which can lead to misleading evaluations. To bypass these drawbacks, we propose a framework for self-supervised evaluation of LLMs by analyzing their sensitivity or invariance to transformations on the input text. Self-supervised evaluation can directly monitor LLM behavior on datasets collected in the wild or streamed during live model deployment. We demonstrate self-supervised evaluation strategies for measuring closed-book knowledge, toxicity, and long-range context dependence, in addition to sensitivity to grammatical structure and tokenization errors. When comparisons to similar human-labeled benchmarks are available, we find strong correlations between self-supervised and human-supervised evaluations. The self-supervised paradigm complements current evaluation strategies that rely on labeled data.

As large language models (LLMs) increasingly permeate daily lives, there is a growing demand for real-time interactions that mirror human conversations. Traditional turn-based chat systems driven by LLMs prevent users from verbally interacting with the system while it is generating responses. To overcome these limitations, we adapt existing LLMs to duplex models so that these LLMs can listen for users while generating output and dynamically adjust themselves to provide users with instant feedback. % such as in response to interruptions. Specifically, we divide the queries and responses of conversations into several time slices and then adopt a time-division-multiplexing (TDM) encoding-decoding strategy to pseudo-simultaneously process these slices. Furthermore, to make LLMs proficient enough to handle real-time conversations, we build a fine-tuning dataset consisting of alternating time slices of queries and responses as well as covering typical feedback types in instantaneous interactions. Our experiments show that although the queries and responses of conversations are segmented into incomplete slices for processing, LLMs can preserve their original performance on standard benchmarks with a few fine-tuning steps on our dataset. Automatic and human evaluation indicate that duplex models make user-AI interactions more natural and human-like, and greatly improve user satisfaction compared to vanilla LLMs. Our duplex model and dataset will be released.

High-quality conversational datasets are essential for developing AI models that can communicate with users. One way to foster deeper interactions between a chatbot and its user is through personas, aspects of the user's character that provide insights into their personality, motivations, and behaviors. Training Natural Language Processing (NLP) models on a diverse and comprehensive persona-based dataset can lead to conversational models that create a deeper connection with the user, and maintain their engagement. In this paper, we leverage the power of Large Language Models (LLMs) to create a large, high-quality conversational dataset from a seed dataset. We propose a Generator-Critic architecture framework to expand the initial dataset, while improving the quality of its conversations. The Generator is an LLM prompted to output conversations. The Critic consists of a mixture of expert LLMs that control the quality of the generated conversations. These experts select the best generated conversations, which we then use to improve the Generator. We release Synthetic-Persona-Chat, consisting of 20k conversations seeded from Persona-Chat. We evaluate the quality of Synthetic-Persona-Chat and our generation framework on different dimensions through extensive experiments, and observe that the losing rate of Synthetic-Persona-Chat against Persona-Chat during Turing test decreases from 17.2% to 8.8% over three iterations.

The paper describes the RuSentNE-2023 evaluation devoted to targeted sentiment analysis in Russian news texts. The task is to predict sentiment towards a named entity in a single sentence. The dataset for RuSentNE-2023 evaluation is based on the Russian news corpus RuSentNE having rich sentiment-related annotation. The corpus is annotated with named entities and sentiments towards these entities, along with related effects and emotional states. The evaluation was organized using the CodaLab competition framework. The main evaluation measure was macro-averaged measure of positive and negative classes. The best results achieved were of 66% Macro F-measure (Positive+Negative classes). We also tested ChatGPT on the test set from our evaluation and found that the zero-shot answers provided by ChatGPT reached 60% of the F-measure, which corresponds to 4th place in the evaluation. ChatGPT also provided detailed explanations of its conclusion. This can be considered as quite high for zero-shot application.

Large language models have been successfully applied to programming assistance tasks, such as code completion, code insertion, and instructional code editing. However, these applications remain insufficiently automated and struggle to effectively integrate various types of information during the programming process, including coding history, current code, and user instructions. In this work, we propose a new conversational framework that comprehensively integrates these information sources, collect data to train our models and evaluate their performance. Firstly, to thoroughly evaluate how well models align with different types of information and the quality of their outputs, we introduce a new benchmark, APEval (Assist Programming Eval), to comprehensively assess the performance of models in programming assistance tasks. Then, for data collection, we develop a data generation pipeline, Programming-Instruct, which synthesizes training data from diverse sources, such as GitHub and online judge platforms. This pipeline can automatically generate various types of messages throughout the programming process. Finally, using this pipeline, we generate 219K samples, fine-tune multiple models, and develop the CursorCore series. We show that CursorCore outperforms other models of comparable size. This framework unifies applications such as inline chat and automated editing, contributes to the advancement of coding assistants. Code, models and data are freely available at https://github.com/TechxGenus/CursorCore.

It is important to define meaningful and interpretable automatic evaluation metrics for open-domain dialog research. Standard language generation metrics have been shown to be ineffective for dialog. This paper introduces the FED metric (fine-grained evaluation of dialog), an automatic evaluation metric which uses DialoGPT, without any fine-tuning or supervision. It also introduces the FED dataset which is constructed by annotating a set of human-system and human-human conversations with eighteen fine-grained dialog qualities. The FED metric (1) does not rely on a ground-truth response, (2) does not require training data and (3) measures fine-grained dialog qualities at both the turn and whole dialog levels. FED attains moderate to strong correlation with human judgement at both levels.