What makes a good conversation?

This blog post is about the NAACL 2019 paper What makes a good conversation? How controllable attributes affect human judgments by Abigail See, Stephen Roller, Douwe Kiela and Jason Weston. On the left are tasks like Machine Translation (MT), which are less open-ended (i.e. Given the close correspondence between input and output, these tasks can be accomplished mostly (but not entirely) by decisions at the word/phrase level. On the right are tasks like Story Generation and Chitchat Dialogue, which are more open-ended (i.e. For these tasks, the ability to make high-level decisions (e.g.