Xiang Zhang¹, Yan Liu¹, Gong Chen¹ and Sheng-hua Zhong², ¹The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, China, ²Shenzhen University, China

Chatbot has long been an important research topic in artificial intelligence and attracts lots of attention recently. Despite significant advancements in language ability, the interactions between users and chatbots are rather generic, short-term, and transnational. It has always been challenging to develop truly personal chatbots and even more difficult to establish longterm, affective connections. This paper first brings up “nurture” as a new interaction mode with chatbots. We introduce the nurture framework and accordingly design the learning algorithm and nurture functions. Then we present LightBlue – a platform that allows non-professionals to nurture personal chatbots from scratch. Experiments on both closed- and open-domain tasks validate the proposed framework and demonstrate a promising method for facilitating long-term interaction between users and chatbots.

Personal Chatbot, Conversation Agent, Nurture, Human-chatbot Interaction, Long-term Relationship.