# CausalDialogue: Modeling Utterance-level Causality in Conversations

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.10515 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10515/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 33 of its 56 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Dec 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 33)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [LaMDA: Language Models for Dialog Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.08239/) (2022)
- [A Diversity-Promoting Objective Function for Neural Conversation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1510.03055/) (2015)
- [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)
- [Neural Text Generation with Unlikelihood Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.04319/) (2019)
- [How NOT To Evaluate Your Dialogue System: An Empirical Study of Unsupervised Evaluation Metrics for Dialogue Response Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08023/) (2016)
- [Deep Reinforcement Learning for Dialogue Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.01541/) (2016)
- [A Persona-Based Neural Conversation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.06155/) (2016)
- [Learning Discourse-level Diversity for Neural Dialog Models using Conditional Variational Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.10960/) (2017)
- [Building End-To-End Dialogue Systems Using Generative Hierarchical Neural Network Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1507.04808/) (2015)
- [A Neural Conversational Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.05869/) (2015)
- [The Ubuntu Dialogue Corpus: A Large Dataset for Research in Unstructured Multi-Turn Dialogue Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.08909/) (2015)
- [A Knowledge-Grounded Neural Conversation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.01932/) (2017)
- [Training Millions of Personalized Dialogue Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.01984/) (2018)
- [Learning to Speak and Act in a Fantasy Text Adventure Game](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.03094/) (2019)
- [MuTual: A Dataset for Multi-Turn Dialogue Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04494/) (2020)
- [word2vec Explained: deriving Mikolov et al.'s negative-sampling word-embedding method](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1402.3722/) (2014)
- [Adversarial Learning for Neural Dialogue Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.06547/) (2017)
- [A Neural Network Approach to Context-Sensitive Generation of Conversational Responses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.06714/) (2015)
- [Human-centric Dialog Training via Offline Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05848/) (2020)
- [Dialogue-Based Relation Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.08056/) (2020)
- [Dialogue Learning With Human-In-The-Loop](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.09823/) (2016)
- [How to Motivate Your Dragon: Teaching Goal-Driven Agents to Speak and Act in Fantasy Worlds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.00685/) (2020)
- [CHAI: A CHatbot AI for Task-Oriented Dialogue with Offline Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.08426/) (2022)
- [DyKgChat: Benchmarking Dialogue Generation Grounding on Dynamic Knowledge Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.00610/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [A Gradient Analysis Framework for Rewarding Good and Penalizing Bad Examples in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.16751/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Despite their widespread adoption, neural conversation models have yet to exhibit natural chat capabilities with humans. In this research, we examine user utterances as causes and generated responses as effects, recognizing that changes in a cause should produce a different effect. To further explore this concept, we have compiled and expanded upon a new dataset called CausalDialogue through crowd-sourcing. This dataset includes multiple cause-effect pairs within a directed acyclic graph (DAG) structure. Our analysis reveals that traditional loss functions struggle to effectively incorporate the DAG structure, leading us to propose a causality-enhanced method called Exponential Maximum Average Treatment Effect (ExMATE) to enhance the impact of causality at the utterance level in training neural conversation models. To evaluate the needs of considering causality in dialogue generation, we built a comprehensive benchmark on CausalDialogue dataset using different models, inference, and training methods. Through experiments, we find that a causality-inspired loss like ExMATE can improve the diversity and agility of conventional loss function and there is still room for improvement to reach human-level quality on this new dataset.