Papers › TuringAdvice: A Generative and Dynamic Evaluation of Language Use

TuringAdvice: A Generative and Dynamic Evaluation of Language Use

7 Apr 2020NAACL 2021 4arXiv:2004.03607archive 2025-07-28

Rowan Zellers, Ari Holtzman, Elizabeth Clark, Lianhui Qin, Ali Farhadi, Yejin Choi

We propose TuringAdvice, a new challenge task and dataset for language understanding models. Given a written situation that a real person is currently facing, a model must generate helpful advice in natural language. Our evaluation framework tests a fundamental aspect of human language understanding: our ability to use language to resolve open-ended situations by communicating with each other. Empirical results show that today's models struggle at TuringAdvice, even multibillion parameter models finetuned on 600k in-domain training examples. The best model, a finetuned T5, writes advice that is at least as helpful as human-written advice in only 14% of cases; a much larger non-finetunable GPT3 model does even worse at 4%. This low performance reveals language understanding errors that are hard to spot outside of a generative setting, showing much room for progress.

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AdafactorAttentionAttention DropoutBPEDense ConnectionsDropoutGated Linear UnitInverse Square Root ScheduleLayer NormalizationLinear LayerMulti-Head AttentionResidual ConnectionSentencePieceSoftmaxT5

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