Champagne: Learning Real-world Conversation from Large-Scale Web Videos

Visual information is central to conversation: body gestures and physical behaviour, for example, contribute to meaning that transcends words alone. To date, however, most neural conversational models are limited to just text. We introduce Champagne, a generative model of conversations that can account for visual contexts. To train Champagne, we collect and release YTD-18M, a large-scale corpus of 18M video-based dialogues. YTD-18M is constructed from web videos: crucial to our data collection pipeline is a pretrained language model that converts error-prone automatic transcripts to a cleaner dialogue format while maintaining meaning.Human evaluation reveals that YTD-18M is more sensible and specific than prior resources (MMDialog [17], 1M dialogues), while maintaining visual-groundedness. Experiments demonstrate that 1) Champagne learns to conduct conversation from YTD-18M; and 2) when fine-tuned, it achieves state-of-the-art results on four vision-language tasks focused on real-world conversations. We release data, models, and code at https://seungjuhan.me/champagne.