A Dataset for Research on Short-Text Conversations

Natural language conversation is widely regarded as a highly difficult problem, which is usually attacked with either rule-based or learning-based models. In this paper we propose a retrieval-based automatic response model for short-text conversation, to exploit the vast amount of short conversation instances available on social media. For this purpose we introduce a dataset of short-text conversation based on the real-world instances from Sina Weibo (a popular Chinese microblog service), which will be soon released to public. This dataset provides rich collection of instances for the research on finding natural and relevant short responses to a given short text, and useful for both training and testing of conversation models. This dataset consists of both naturally formed conversations, manually labeled data, and a large repository of candidate responses. Our preliminary experiments demonstrate that the simple retrieval-based conversation model performs reasonably well when combined with the rich instances in our dataset.