# Neural Generation Meets Real People: Building a Social, Informative Open-Domain Dialogue Agent

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.12021 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12021/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 44 of its 81 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Jul 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 44)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13461/) (2019)
- [DistilBERT, a distilled version of BERT: smaller, faster, cheaper and lighter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01108/) (2019)
- [The Curious Case of Neural Text Degeneration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09751/) (2019)
- [HuggingFace's Transformers: State-of-the-art Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.03771/) (2019)
- [Know What You Don't Know: Unanswerable Questions for SQuAD](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.03822/) (2018)
- [Hierarchical Neural Story Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.04833/) (2018)
- [PEGASUS: Pre-training with Extracted Gap-sentences for Abstractive Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.08777/) (2019)
- [Adafactor: Adaptive Learning Rates with Sublinear Memory Cost](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.04235/) (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)
- [CTRL: A Conditional Transformer Language Model for Controllable Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.05858/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Neural Text Generation with Unlikelihood Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.04319/) (2019)
- [Towards a Human-like Open-Domain Chatbot](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.09977/) (2020)
- [Multi-News: a Large-Scale Multi-Document Summarization Dataset and Abstractive Hierarchical Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.01749/) (2019)
- [Deep Learning with Limited Numerical Precision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.02551/) (2015)
- [The Second Conversational Intelligence Challenge (ConvAI2)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.00098/) (2019)
- [Recipes for Safety in Open-domain Chatbots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.07079/) (2020)
- [ParlAI: A Dialog Research Software Platform](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.06476/) (2017)
- [Can You Put it All Together: Evaluating Conversational Agents' Ability to Blend Skills](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.08449/) (2020)
- [Neural Path Hunter: Reducing Hallucination in Dialogue Systems via Path Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08455/) (2021)
- [From Eliza to XiaoIce: Challenges and Opportunities with Social Chatbots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.01957/) (2018)
- [End-to-End Neural Entity Linking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.07699/) (2018)
- [A Novel Bi-directional Interrelated Model for Joint Intent Detection and Slot Filling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.00390/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [SUQL: Conversational Search over Structured and Unstructured Data with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.09818/) (2023)
- [Roll Up Your Sleeves: Working with a Collaborative and Engaging Task-Oriented Dialogue System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.16081/) (2023)
- [DialGuide: Aligning Dialogue Model Behavior with Developer Guidelines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10557/) (2022)
- [DeepSAGE: Stage-Aware Reinforcement Learning for Structured CBT Counseling Dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.22615/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present Chirpy Cardinal, an open-domain social chatbot. Aiming to be both informative and conversational, our bot chats with users in an authentic, emotionally intelligent way. By integrating controlled neural generation with scaffolded, hand-written dialogue, we let both the user and bot take turns driving the conversation, producing an engaging and socially fluent experience. Deployed in the fourth iteration of the Alexa Prize Socialbot Grand Challenge, Chirpy Cardinal handled thousands of conversations per day, placing second out of nine bots with an average user rating of 3.58/5.