The problem with "open-domain" chatbots
By A. Seza Doğruöz and Gabriel Skantze
There is an increasing interest in open-domain chatbots, which are built to communicate with humans on any topic, task, or domain. This interest has been supported by fictional characters and systems in the entertainment business (e.g. the movie “Her”), as well as the media attention received by chatbots developed in research labs of large tech companies, such as Google’s LaMDA and Facebook’s Blender.
The term “open-domain” suggests that these chatbots can converse on any topic, which is assumed to be more challenging than earlier attempts at building task-specific systems. However, the boundaries of “openness” and the criteria for evaluating these conversations are not well-defined.
Typically, a human tester is given an empty prompt and asked to “just chat with the system.” This is a highly unusual setting for human communication in the sense that we do not speak about anything with anybody and anywhere randomly. Instead, we are more selective about our choices of communication in terms of conversation topics according to our conversation partners and context (e.g., at work or at school). Therefore, building a truly “open-domain” chatbot is perhaps unrealistic and not even necessary, since human-human conversations are not that “open-domain” and random either.
Read the full article on TechTalks.