2. The computer-implemented method of claim 1 , wherein extracting candidate context-message-response n-tuples from at least one source of conversational data and forming a set of multi-reference responses further comprises: extracting candidate context-message-response n tuples from the at least one source of conversational data, wherein individual candidate context-message-response n-tuples comprise a human-generated message, a conversational context, and a reference response corresponding to the human-generated message.
2. The computer-implemented method of claim 1 , wherein extracting candidate context-message-response n-tuples from at least one source of conversational data and forming a set of multi-reference responses further comprises: extracting candidate context-message-response n tuples from the at least one source of conversational data, wherein individual candidate context-message-response n-tuples comprise a human-generated message, a conversational context, and a reference response corresponding to the human-generated message. 3. The computer-implemented method of claim 2 , further comprising: selecting a response from the extracted candidate context-message-response n tuples based on a context of a message associated with the response to form a reference response in the set of multi-reference responses, wherein a message associated with the reference response corresponds to the selected human-generated message.