SOLID: Self-seeding and Multi-intent Self-instructing LLMs for Generating Intent-aware Information-Seeking dialogs

The official repository for the following paper: “SOLID: Self-instructing and Self-seeding LLMs for Large-scale Intent-Aware Informating-Seeeking Dialogue Generation”. Please read the paper for a detailed information about SOLID.

If you use this dataset, please use the following bibtex references:

@misc{askari2024selfseeding,
      title={Self-seeding and Multi-intent Self-instructing LLMs for Generating Intent-aware Information-Seeking dialogs}, 
      author={Arian Askari and Roxana Petcu and Chuan Meng and Mohammad Aliannejadi and Amin Abolghasemi and Evangelos Kanoulas and Suzan Verberne},
      year={2024},
      eprint={2402.11633},
      archivePrefix={arXiv},
      primaryClass={cs.CL}
}

This work has been done under the supervision of Prof. Mohammad Aliannejadi, Evangelos Kanoulas, and Suzan Verberne during my visiting research at Information Retrieval Lab at the University of Amsterdam (IRLab@UvA).

Overiew

We introduce SOLID, a novel approach to generating large-scale, intent-aware information-seeking dialogues. Our method leverages self-seeding and multi-intent self-instructing schemes to produce high-quality dialogues. Additionally, we propose SOLID-RL, an enhanced version of SOLID, designed to increase efficiency without compromising the quality of generated dialogues. SOLID’s method to creating intent-aware dialogs highlights the possibilities of using Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate meaningful and diverse while intent-aware conversations.

Dataset

Explore data and src directories on the SOLID Github repository to access to our datasets and code for intent-aware dialogue generation.

Key Features

• Self-Seeding: Generates dialogue seeds using the LLM’s own knowledge, ensuring high familiarity and quality.
• Multi-Intent Self-Instructing: Automatically generates prompt instructions for varying intent combinations, drastically reducing manual effort.
• SOLID-RL with LMQ: Enhances efficiency by 11x over SOLID without sacrificing quality, achieved by the novel Length-based Mixed-Quality (LMQ) training mechanism.

Contributions

1. Innovative Generation Method: SOLID, with its self-seeding and multi-intent instructing, for creating intent-aware dialogues.
2. Enhanced Efficiency: SOLID-RL incorporates LMQ for faster and higher-quality dialogue generation.
3. Extensive Datasets: Release of SOLISpeak and SOLITurbo, two large-scale synthetic datasets for advancing intent prediction research.
4. Superior IP Method Performance: Training intent predictor (IP) methods on SOLID-generated data significantly improves effectiveness over traditional human-annotated datasets.

Intent-Aware Dialog Generation with SOLID

Figure of SOLID’s pipeline

SOLID introduces a new way to create and use dialog seeds for generating intent-aware dialogs illustrated in above figure. It begins with generating entity types, names, and attributes. This allows SOLID to make detailed background documents and questions. These elements help generate deeper and more varied dialogs, making the most of what LLMs offer.

Step 1: Seed Generation

The dialog generation in SOLID focuses on specific entities to ensure variety and familiarity. The process includes three important steps:

1. Entity Type Generation: The LLM is asked to come up with different entity types (e.g., ‘Person’) and their attributes (e.g., ‘Occupation’). This creates a wide range of topics.

2. Entity Name Generation: For each entity type, the LLM creates specific names (e.g., ‘Albert Einstein’). To ensure variety, SOLID prompts LLM to generate 100 entity names for each letter of the English alphabet for every entity type. This leads to 50,000 entity names after cleaning them up, providing a large pool of dialog seeds.

Step 2: Ice Breaker

With the seeds ready, the next step involves generating an ice breaker to kickstart the conversation:

1. Background Document Generation: Following insights from prior research, this step involves asking the LLM to create a document about the entity. This adds depth to the dialog and improves its quality.

2. Conversation Starter: With the entity type, attributes, name, and background document in hand, the LLM generates the first line of the conversation.

Step 3: Intent-Aware Dialogs

Using the outputs from the first two steps, SOLID an algorithm, explained in the appendix of the paper, to generate dialog data, aiming to produce the next utterance constrained to intents at each step. This keeps the dialog intent-aware.