Recent advances in large-scale language modeling and generation have enabled the creation of dialogue agents that exhibit human-like responses in a wide range of conversational scenarios spanning a diverse set of tasks, from general chit-chat to focused goal-oriented discourse. While these agents excel at generating high-quality responses that are relevant to prior context, they suffer from a lack of awareness of the overall direction in which the conversation is headed, and the likelihood of task success inherent therein. Thus, we propose a framework in which dialogue agents can evaluate the progression of a conversation toward or away from desired outcomes, and use this signal to inform planning for subsequent responses. Our framework is composed of three key elements: (1) the notion of a "global" dialogue state (GDS) space, (2) a task-specific progression function (PF) computed in terms of a conversation's trajectory through this space, and (3) a planning mechanism based on dialogue rollouts by which an agent may use progression signals to select its next response.
@article{arxiv.2205.03692,
title = {Towards a Progression-Aware Autonomous Dialogue Agent},
author = {Abraham Sanders and Tomek Strzalkowski and Mei Si and Albert Chang and Deepanshu Dey and Jonas Braasch and Dakuo Wang},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2205.03692},
year = {2022}
}