# Talking to myself: self-dialogues as data for conversational agents

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1809.06641 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.06641/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 18 Sep 2018.

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [GALAXY: A Generative Pre-trained Model for Task-Oriented Dialog with Semi-Supervised Learning and Explicit Policy Injection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14592/) (2021)
- [SPACE-3: Unified Dialog Model Pre-training for Task-Oriented Dialog Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.06664/) (2022)
- [SPACE-2: Tree-Structured Semi-Supervised Contrastive Pre-training for Task-Oriented Dialog Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.06638/) (2022)
- [UniPCM: Universal Pre-trained Conversation Model with Task-aware Automatic Prompt](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.11065/) (2023)
- [Dial2vec: Self-Guided Contrastive Learning of Unsupervised Dialogue Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.15332/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Conversational agents are gaining popularity with the increasing ubiquity of smart devices. However, training agents in a data driven manner is challenging due to a lack of suitable corpora. This paper presents a novel method for gathering topical, unstructured conversational data in an efficient way: self-dialogues through crowd-sourcing. Alongside this paper, we include a corpus of 3.6 million words across 23 topics. We argue the utility of the corpus by comparing self-dialogues with standard two-party conversations as well as data from other corpora.