OTTers: One-turn Topic Transitions for Open-Domain Dialogue

Mixed initiative in open-domain dialogue requires a system to pro-actively introduce new topics. The one-turn topic transition task explores how a system connects two topics in a cooperative and coherent manner. The goal of the task is to generate a "bridging" utterance connecting the new topic to the topic of the previous conversation turn. We are especially interested in commonsense explanations of how a new topic relates to what has been mentioned before. We first collect a new dataset of human one-turn topic transitions, which we call OTTers 1 . We then explore different strategies used by humans when asked to complete such a task, and notice that the use of a bridging utterance to connect the two topics is the approach used the most. We finally show how existing state-of-the-art text generation models can be adapted to this task and examine the performance of these baselines on different splits of the OTTers data. A: i like to eat the same thing as ninja turtles. T: I love pizza. I eat it while I skateboard. B: i enjoy riding around on a plank with wheels. Bridging: Missing Link A: i prefer things to be authentic. T: I think children are the truest form of authenticity because they say things unfiltered. B: i am not a fan of children. Disjunctive A: i like american made cars. T: I like liver cooked in butter -just throwing that in! B: i avoid eating broccoli. Off-Task A: i prefer things to be authentic. T: my bro just made some authentic thai chicken. B: i am not a fan of children. Off-Topic A: i learnt to drive. T: I had a rough night sleeping in my new bed last night. B: i like making a salmon entree.