@misc{peng2022godel, author = {Peng, Baolin and Galley, Michel and He, Pengcheng and Brockett, Chris and Liden, Lars and Nouri, Elnaz and Yu, Zhou and Dolan, Bill and Gao, Jianfeng}, title = {GODEL: Large-Scale Pre-Training for Goal-Directed Dialog}, howpublished = {arXiv}, year = {2022}, month = {May}, abstract = {We introduce GODEL (Grounded Open Dialogue Language Model), a large pre-trained language model for dialog. In contrast with earlier models such as DialoGPT, GODEL leverages a new phase of grounded pre-training designed to better support adapting GODEL to a wide range of downstream dialog tasks that require information external to the current conversation (e.g., a database or document) to produce good responses. Experiments against an array of benchmarks that encompass task-oriented dialog, conversational QA, and grounded open-domain dialog show that GODEL outperforms state-of-the-art pre-trained dialog models in few-shot fine-tuning setups, in terms of both human and automatic evaluation. A novel feature of our evaluation methodology is the introduction of a notion of utility that assesses the usefulness of responses (extrinsic evaluation) in addition to their communicative features (intrinsic evaluation). We show that extrinsic evaluation offers improved inter-annotator agreement and correlation with automated metrics. Code and data processing scripts are publicly available.}, url = {http://approjects.co.za/?big=en-us/research/publication/godel-large-scale-pre-training-for-goal-directed-dialog/}, }