Dialogue Chain-of-Thought Distillation for Commonsense-aware Conversational Agents

Hyungjoo Chae, Yongho Song, Kai Ong, Taeyoon Kwon, Minjin Kim, Youngjae Yu, Dongha Lee, Dongyeop Kang, Jinyoung Yeo


Abstract
Human-like chatbots necessitate the use of commonsense reasoning in order to effectively comprehend and respond to implicit information present within conversations. Achieving such coherence and informativeness in responses, however, is a non-trivial task. Even for large language models (LLMs), the task of identifying and aggregating key evidence within a single hop presents a substantial challenge. This complexity arises because such evidence is scattered across multiple turns in a conversation, thus necessitating integration over multiple hops. Hence, our focus is to facilitate such multi-hop reasoning over a dialogue context, namely dialogue chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning. To this end, we propose a knowledge distillation framework that leverages LLMs as unreliable teachers and selectively distills consistent and helpful rationales via alignment filters. We further present DOCTOR, a DialOgue Chain-of-ThOught Reasoner that provides reliable CoT rationales for response generation. We conduct extensive experiments to show that enhancing dialogue agents with high-quality rationales from DOCTOR significantly improves the quality of their responses.
Anthology ID:
2023.emnlp-main.342
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
5606–5632
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.342
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.342
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Hyungjoo Chae, Yongho Song, Kai Ong, Taeyoon Kwon, Minjin Kim, Youngjae Yu, Dongha Lee, Dongyeop Kang, and Jinyoung Yeo. 2023. Dialogue Chain-of-Thought Distillation for Commonsense-aware Conversational Agents. In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 5606–5632, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Dialogue Chain-of-Thought Distillation for Commonsense-aware Conversational Agents (Chae et al., EMNLP 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.342.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.342.mp4