We present Chirpy Cardinal, an open-domain social chatbot. Aiming to be both informative and conversational, our bot chats with users in an authentic, emotionally intelligent way. By integrating controlled neural generation with scaffolded, hand-written dialogue, we let both the user and bot take turns driving the conversation, producing an engaging and socially fluent experience. Deployed in the fourth iteration of the Alexa Prize Socialbot Grand Challenge, Chirpy Cardinal handled thousands of conversations per day, placing second out of nine bots with an average user rating of 3.58/5.
@article{arxiv.2207.12021,
title = {Neural Generation Meets Real People: Building a Social, Informative Open-Domain Dialogue Agent},
author = {Ethan A. Chi and Ashwin Paranjape and Abigail See and Caleb Chiam and Trenton Chang and Kathleen Kenealy and Swee Kiat Lim and Amelia Hardy and Chetanya Rastogi and Haojun Li and Alexander Iyabor and Yutong He and Hari Sowrirajan and Peng Qi and Kaushik Ram Sadagopan and Nguyet Minh Phu and Dilara Soylu and Jillian Tang and Avanika Narayan and Giovanni Campagna and Christopher D. Manning},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2207.12021},
year = {2023}
}