The Open-domain Paradox for Chatbots: Common Ground as the Basis for Human-like Dialogue

2023/03/21 by Gabriel Skantze, Skantze, Gabriel, A. Seza Doğruöz +1 · 1 citation
Computer Science · #AI in Service Interactions #Computation and Language (cs.CL) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Speech and dialogue systems #Topic Modeling

paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2303.11708

openalex publication_date 2023/03/21 · openalex created_date 2023/03/23 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28

Abstract

There is a surge in interest in the development of open-domain chatbots, driven by the recent advancements of large language models. The "openness" of the dialogue is expected to be maximized by providing minimal information to the users about the common ground they can expect, including the presumed joint activity. However, evidence suggests that the effect is the opposite. Asking users to "just chat about anything" results in a very narrow form of dialogue, which we refer to as the "open-domain paradox". In this position paper, we explain this paradox through the theory of common ground as the basis for human-like communication. Furthermore, we question the assumptions behind open-domain chatbots and identify paths forward for enabling common ground in human-computer dialogue.

Cited by

• Correct-Detect: Balancing Performance and Ambiguity Through the Lens of Coreference Resolution in LLMs

Related

• Chatbots' Greetings to Human-Computer Communication
• Low-Resource Adaptation of Open-Domain Generative Chatbots
• Topical-Chat: Towards Knowledge-Grounded Open-Domain Conversations
• Open-Domain Conversational Agents: Current Progress, Open Problems, and Future Directions
• Some hypotheses on how chatbots work in problem-solving-driven conversations. Large Language Models as confirmation of the Innovation Illusion