It has always been a great challenge for AI bots to conduct coherent, informative, and engaging conversations as human beings. For robots to serve as emotional companions or intelligent assistants it is essential that they develop high-quality open-domain dialogue systems. As pre-training technology further promotes models’ ability to learn from large-scale unannotated data, mainstream research is focusing on making more efficient and full use of massive data to improve open-domain dialogue systems. To this end, Baidu releases the PLATO-XL with up to 11 billion parameters, achieving new breakthroughs in Chinese and English conversations.

In recent years we have witnessed constant progress in the field of open-domain conversation, from Google’s Meena and Facebook’s Blender to Baidu’s PLATO. In DSTC-9, the top dialog system technology challenge, Baidu PLATO-2 broke a record by winning the first place in five different dialogue tasks.

Now Baidu PLATO-2 has been upgraded to PLATO-XL. Over ten billion parameters make it the world’s largest Chinese and English dialogue generation model. Achieving superior performance in open-domain conversation, PLATO-XL raises our expectation of what hundred-billion or even trillion parameter dialogue models could do.

Source: http://research.baidu.com/Blog/index-view?id=163