# InterviewBot: Real-Time End-to-End Dialogue System to Interview Students for College Admission

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.15049 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15049/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 22 of its 47 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Mar 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13461/) (2019)
- [DialoGPT: Large-Scale Generative Pre-training for Conversational Response Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.00536/) (2019)
- [Recipes for building an open-domain chatbot](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.13637/) (2020)
- [Towards a Human-like Open-Domain Chatbot](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.09977/) (2020)
- [Beyond Goldfish Memory: Long-Term Open-Domain Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.07567/) (2021)
- [BlenderBot 3: a deployed conversational agent that continually learns to responsibly engage](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.03188/) (2022)
- [A Hierarchical Latent Variable Encoder-Decoder Model for Generating Dialogues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.06069/) (2016)
- [PLATO: Pre-trained Dialogue Generation Model with Discrete Latent Variable](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.07931/) (2019)
- [Can You Put it All Together: Evaluating Conversational Agents' Ability to Blend Skills](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.08449/) (2020)
- [Learning to Select Knowledge for Response Generation in Dialog Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.04911/) (2019)
- [Jointly Measuring Diversity and Quality in Text Generation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03971/) (2019)
- [PLATO-XL: Exploring the Large-scale Pre-training of Dialogue Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.09519/) (2021)
- [Pretraining Methods for Dialog Context Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00414/) (2019)
- [EVA: An Open-Domain Chinese Dialogue System with Large-Scale Generative Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.01547/) (2021)
- [Dialogue Act Classification with Context-Aware Self-Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.02594/) (2019)
- [Emora: An Inquisitive Social Chatbot Who Cares For You](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.04617/) (2020)
- [Goal-Oriented Chatbot Dialog Management Bootstrapping with Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.00500/) (2018)
- [Confiding in and Listening to Virtual Agents: The Effect of Personality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.00746/) (2018)
- [ELIT: Emory Language and Information Toolkit](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.03903/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present the InterviewBot that dynamically integrates conversation history and customized topics into a coherent embedding space to conduct 10 mins hybrid-domain (open and closed) conversations with foreign students applying to U.S. colleges for assessing their academic and cultural readiness. To build a neural-based end-to-end dialogue model, 7,361 audio recordings of human-to-human interviews are automatically transcribed, where 440 are manually corrected for finetuning and evaluation. To overcome the input/output size limit of a transformer-based encoder-decoder model, two new methods are proposed, context attention and topic storing, allowing the model to make relevant and consistent interactions. Our final model is tested both statistically by comparing its responses to the interview data and dynamically by inviting professional interviewers and various students to interact with it in real-time, finding it highly satisfactory in fluency and context awareness.