# Proto: A Neural Cocktail for Generating Appealing Conversations

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.02513 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.02513/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 28 of its 39 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Sep 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 28 of 28)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [The Curious Case of Neural Text Degeneration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09751/) (2019)
- [A Broad-Coverage Challenge Corpus for Sentence Understanding through Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.05426/) (2017)
- [A Call for Clarity in Reporting BLEU Scores](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.08771/) (2018)
- [DialoGPT: Large-Scale Generative Pre-training for Conversational Response Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.00536/) (2019)
- [Personalizing Dialogue Agents: I have a dog, do you have pets too?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07243/) (2018)
- [DailyDialog: A Manually Labelled Multi-turn Dialogue Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.03957/) (2017)
- [Recipes for building an open-domain chatbot](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.13637/) (2020)
- [Wizard of Wikipedia: Knowledge-Powered Conversational agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.01241/) (2018)
- [AllenNLP: A Deep Semantic Natural Language Processing Platform](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.07640/) (2018)
- [End-to-end Neural Coreference Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.07045/) (2017)
- [TransferTransfo: A Transfer Learning Approach for Neural Network Based Conversational Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.08149/) (2019)
- [The Second Conversational Intelligence Challenge (ConvAI2)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.00098/) (2019)
- [The Ubuntu Dialogue Corpus: A Large Dataset for Research in Unstructured Multi-Turn Dialogue Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.08909/) (2015)
- [The Design and Implementation of XiaoIce, an Empathetic Social Chatbot](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.08989/) (2018)
- [Recipes for Safety in Open-domain Chatbots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.07079/) (2020)
- [Can You Put it All Together: Evaluating Conversational Agents' Ability to Blend Skills](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.08449/) (2020)
- [Training Millions of Personalized Dialogue Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.01984/) (2018)
- [From Eliza to XiaoIce: Challenges and Opportunities with Social Chatbots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.01957/) (2018)
- [Dialogue Response Ranking Training with Large-Scale Human Feedback Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.06978/) (2020)
- [Deep Reinforcement Learning for Mention-Ranking Coreference Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.08667/) (2016)
- [Improving Coreference Resolution by Learning Entity-Level Distributed Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.01323/) (2016)
- [Neural Generation Meets Real People: Towards Emotionally Engaging Mixed-Initiative Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.12348/) (2020)
- [Policy-Driven Neural Response Generation for Knowledge-Grounded Dialogue Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12529/) (2020)
- [ConCET: Entity-Aware Topic Classification for Open-Domain Conversational Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.13798/) (2020)

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

- [A Systematic Evaluation of Response Selection for Open Domain Dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.04379/) (2022)
- [A Transformer-based Response Evaluator for Open-Domain Spoken Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04424/) (2023)
- [Search-Engine-augmented Dialogue Response Generation with Cheaply Supervised Query Production](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.09300/) (2023)
- [Let's Get Personal: Personal Questions Improve SocialBot Performance in the Alexa Prize](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.04953/) (2023)
- [The Failure Happens Before the Drift: The Social Dynamics of Values in LLM Agent Societies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.05514/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this paper, we present our Alexa Prize Grand Challenge 4 socialbot: Proto. Leveraging diverse sources of world knowledge, and powered by a suite of neural and rule-based natural language understanding modules, state-of-the-art neural generators, novel state-based deterministic generators, an ensemble of neural re-rankers, a robust post-processing algorithm, and an efficient overall conversation strategy, Proto strives to be able to converse coherently about a diverse range of topics of interest to humans, and provide a memorable experience to the user. In this paper we dissect and analyze the different components and conversation strategies implemented by our socialbot, which enables us to generate colloquial, empathetic, engaging, self-rectifying, factually correct, and on-topic response, which has helped us achieve consistent scores throughout the competition.