Recent research has shown that multi-task pre-training greatly improves the
model's robustness and transfer ability, which is crucial for building a
high-quality dialog system. However, most previous works on multi-task
pre-training rely heavily on human-defined input format or prompt, which is not
optimal in quality and quantity. In this work, we propose to use Task-based
Automatic Prompt generation (TAP) to automatically generate high-quality
prompts. Using the high-quality prompts generated, we scale the corpus of the
pre-trained conversation model to 122 datasets from 15 dialog-related tasks,
resulting in Universal Pre-trained Conversation Model (UniPCM), a powerful
foundation model for various conversational tasks and different dialog systems.
Extensive experiments have shown that UniPCM is robust to input prompts and
capable of various dialog-related tasks. Moreover, UniPCM has strong transfer
ability and excels at low resource scenarios, achieving SOTA results on 9
different datasets ranging from task-oriented dialog to open-domain
conversation. Furthermore, we are amazed to find that TAP can generate prompts
on par with those collected with crowdsourcing. The code is released with the
paper