The Story of 'Meena' - an Open-domain Chatbot

 The Story of Meena 

Meena is a chatbot, developed by a team of Google programmers and researchers. 

Most commercial chatbots deployed by large organizations are designed for narrow uses, such as Dialogflow chatbots. These narrow-function chatbots are called closed-domain chatbots. "Meena" is not, it is an example of an open-domain chatbot -- one designed to converse on any topic that can function as a "friend," advisor, and even a tutor. This new development may affect most information and knowledge-based industries, including foreign language education, especially, English as a global language.

Photo credit: https://wethegeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Google-meena-chatbot-1-1024x540.jpg

An open-domain chatbot needs the knowledge and capabilities of thousands of closed-domain chatbots combined. 

In Towards a Conversational Agent that Can Chat About…Anything, Daniel Adiwardana, Senior Research Engineer, and Thang Luong, Senior Research Scientist, Google Research, Brain Team explain why Meena is a clever conversation agent. 

- Meena is a 2.6 billion parameter end-to-end trained neural conversational model. 

- Hence, Meena can conduct conversations that are more sensible and specific than existing state-of-the-art chatbots.

- Researchers fed Meena 341 gigabytes of social media conversation from public social media posts.

What is outstanding about the agent is the ability to deliver utterances that are sensible and specific. Their creators have proposed a new index called 'SSA', and Meena scored higher than any other chatbots.

SSA is a new human evaluation metric that we propose for open-domain chatbots, called Sensibleness and Specificity Average (SSA). The metric is designed to capture basic, but important attributes for human conversation.

Mike Elgan, a columnist at Computer World notes that: 

Meena scored 79 percent on the SSA. That's lower than the average human score of 86 percent, but much higher than the highest score of the previous Loebner Prize chatbot champion, Mitsuku, which scored 56 percengt. (You can chat with Mitsuku here.) In other words, Meena is theoretically closer to the ability to converse to humans than to the second best chatbot. Google researchers claim that human-level SSA is "within reach."

A recent AI technology has offered a big promise, that is, to create a chatbot that is versatile and is capable to handle a variety of conversational topics. Adiwardana and Luong (2020) describe a Google chatbot by the name of Meena. Meena is hailed as being “a chatbot that is not specialized but can still chat about virtually anything a user wants.” In fact, one of the applications cited is the development of chatbots to improve foreign language practice. Below is an example of the human-Meena interaction.

 

 

 Figure: An excerpt of a chat between Meena and a person

Source: https://ai.googleblog.com/2020/01/towards-conversational-agent-that-can.html

 

I would like to end this short note with these quotes:

One of the most astonishing feats performed in the research is that Meena invented a joke.

and

At some point in the future -- it could be 25 years from now, or just five years, most of our interaction with computers and the internet will happen through spoken conversation.

(Mike Elgan)

References

Adiwardana, D. et al (2020).  Towards a Human-like Open-Domain Chatbot. Available online at https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.09977

Adiwardana, D. and Luong, T.  (28 January 2020) Towards a Conversational Agent that Can Chat About…AnythingFrom https://ai.googleblog.com/2020/01/towards-conversational-agent-that-can.html

Mike Elgan (3 Feb 2020). "Meet Meena: Why you'll want to hire this Google chatbot" From https://www.computerworld.com/article/3541292/meet-meena-why-youll-want-to-hire-this-google-chatbot.html