  Despite recent progress in generative open-domain dialogue, the issue of low
response diversity persists. Prior works have addressed this issue via either
novel objective functions, alternative learning approaches such as variational
frameworks, or architectural extensions such as the Randomized Link (RL)
Transformer. However, these approaches typically entail either additional
difficulties during training/inference, or a significant increase in model size
and complexity. Hence, we propose the \underline{Pa}rtially
\underline{Ra}ndomized trans\underline{Former} (PaRaFormer), a simple extension
of the transformer which involves freezing the weights of selected layers after
random initialization. Experimental results reveal that the performance of the
PaRaformer is comparable to that of the aforementioned approaches, despite not
entailing any additional training difficulty or increase in model complexity.

Computation and Language