Sequicity: Simplifying Task-oriented Dialogue Systems with Single Sequence-to-Sequence Architectures (original) (raw)

A Copy-Augmented Sequence-to-Sequence Architecture Gives Good Performance on Task-Oriented Dialogue

2017

Task-oriented dialogue focuses on conversational agents that participate in user-initiated dialogues on domain-specific topics. In contrast to chatbots, which simply seek to sustain open-ended meaningful discourse, existing task-oriented agents usually explicitly model user intent and belief states. This paper examines bypassing such an explicit representation by depending on a latent neural embedding of state and learning selective attention to dialogue history together with copying to incorporate relevant prior context. We complement recent work by showing the effectiveness of simple sequence-to-sequence neural architectures with a copy mechanism. Our model outperforms more complex memory-augmented models by 7% in per-response generation and is on par with the current state-of-the-art on DSTC2.

InstructTODS: Large Language Models for End-to-End Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems

arXiv (Cornell University), 2023

Large language models (LLMs) have been used for diverse tasks in natural language processing (NLP), yet remain under-explored for task-oriented dialogue systems (TODS), especially for end-to-end TODS. We present In-structTODS, a novel off-the-shelf framework for zero-shot end-to-end task-oriented dialogue systems that can adapt to diverse domains without fine-tuning. By leveraging LLMs, Instruct-TODS generates a proxy belief state that seamlessly translates user intentions into dynamic queries for efficient interaction with any KB. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that In-structTODS achieves comparable performance to fully fine-tuned TODS in guiding dialogues to successful completion without prior knowledge or task-specific data. Furthermore, a rigorous human evaluation of end-to-end TODS shows that InstructTODS produces dialogue responses that notably outperform both the gold responses and the state-of-the-art TODS in terms of helpfulness, informativeness, and humanness. Moreover, the effectiveness of LLMs in TODS is further supported by our comprehensive evaluations on TODS subtasks: dialogue state tracking, intent classification, and response generation. Code and implementations could be found here 1 .

SOLOIST: Few-shot Task-Oriented Dialog with A Single Pre-trained Auto-regressive Model

ArXiv, 2020

This paper presents a new method SOLOIST, which uses transfer learning to efficiently build task-oriented dialog systems at scale. We parameterize a dialog system using a Transformer-based auto-regressive language model, which subsumes different dialog modules (e.g., state tracker, dialog policy, response generator) into a single neural model. We pre-train, on large heterogeneous dialog corpora, a large-scale Transformer model which can generate dialog responses grounded in user goals and real-world knowledge for task completion. The pre-trained model can be efficiently adapted to accomplish a new dialog task with a handful of task-specific dialogs via machine teaching. Our experiments demonstrate that (i) SOLOIST creates new state-of-the-art results on two well-known benchmarks, CamRest and MultiWOZ, (ii) in the few-shot learning setting, the dialog systems developed by SOLOIST significantly outperform those developed by existing methods, and (iii) the use of machine teaching subst...

SUMBT+LaRL: Effective Multi-Domain End-to-End Neural Task-Oriented Dialog System

IEEE Access, 2021

The recent advent of neural approaches for developing each dialog component in task-oriented dialog systems has remarkably improved, yet optimizing the overall system performance remains a challenge. Besides, previous research on modeling complicated multi-domain goal-oriented dialogs in end-toend fashion has been limited. In this paper, we present an effective multi-domain end-to-end trainable neural dialog system SUMBT+LaRL that incorporates two previous strong models and facilitates them to be fully differentiable. Specifically, the SUMBT+ estimates user-acts as well as dialog belief states, and the LaRL models latent system action spaces and generates responses given the estimated contexts. We emphasize that the training framework of three steps significantly and stably increase dialog success rates: separately pretraining the SUMBT+ and LaRL, fine-tuning the entire system, and then reinforcement learning of dialog policy. We also introduce new reward criteria of reinforcement learning for dialog policy training. Then, we discuss experimental results depending on the reward criteria and different dialog evaluation methods. Consequently, our model achieved the new state-of-the-art success rate of 85.4% on corpus-based evaluation, and a comparable success rate of 81.40% on simulator-based evaluation provided by the DSTC8 challenge. To our best knowledge, our work is the first comprehensive study of a modularized E2E multi-domain dialog system that learning from each component to the entire dialog policy for task success. INDEX TERMS End-to-end multi-domain task-completion task, goal-oriented dialog systems, the 8th dialog state tracking challenge.

Data-Efficient Goal-Oriented Conversation with Dialogue Knowledge Transfer Networks

Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)

Goal-oriented dialogue systems are now being widely adopted in industry where it is of key importance to maintain a rapid prototyping cycle for new products and domains. Datadriven dialogue system development has to be adapted to meet this requirement-therefore, reducing the amount of data and annotations necessary for training such systems is a central research problem. In this paper, we present the Dialogue Knowledge Transfer Network (DiKTNet), a stateof-the-art approach to goal-oriented dialogue generation which only uses a few example dialogues (i.e. few-shot learning), none of which has to be annotated. We achieve this by performing a 2-stage training. Firstly, we perform unsupervised dialogue representation pre-training on a large source of goal-oriented dialogues in multiple domains, the MetaLWOz corpus. Secondly, at the transfer stage, we train DiKTNet using this representation together with 2 other textual knowledge sources with different levels of generality: ELMo encoder and the main dataset's source domains. Our main dataset is the Stanford Multi-Domain dialogue corpus. We evaluate our model on it in terms of BLEU and Entity F1 scores, and show that our approach significantly and consistently improves upon a series of baseline models as well as over the previous state-of-the-art dialogue generation model, ZSDG. The improvement upon the latter-up to 10% in Entity F1 and the average of 3% in BLEU score-is achieved using only the equivalent of 10% of ZSDG's indomain training data.

Dialog-to-Actions: Building Task-Oriented Dialogue System via Action-Level Generation

Proceedings of the 46th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval

End-to-end generation-based approaches have been investigated and applied in task-oriented dialogue systems. However, in industrial scenarios, existing methods face the bottlenecks of reliability (e.g., domain-inconsistent responses, repetition problem, etc) and efficiency (e.g., long computation time, etc). In this paper, we propose a task-oriented dialogue system via action-level generation. Specifically, we first construct dialogue actions from large-scale dialogues and represent each natural language (NL) response as a sequence of dialogue actions. Further, we train a Sequence-to-Sequence model which takes the dialogue history as the input and outputs a sequence of dialogue actions. The generated dialogue actions are transformed into verbal responses. Experimental results show that our light-weighted method achieves competitive performance, and has the advantage of reliability and efficiency. CCS CONCEPTS • Computing methodologies → Discourse, dialogue and pragmatics.

Incorporating Joint Embeddings into Goal-Oriented Dialogues with Multi-task Learning

2019

Attention-based encoder-decoder neural network models have recently shown promising results in goal-oriented dialogue systems. However, these models struggle to reason over and incorporate state-full knowledge while preserving their end-to-end text generation functionality. Since such models can greatly benefit from user intent and knowledge graph integration, in this paper we propose an RNN-based end-to-end encoder-decoder architecture which is trained with joint embeddings of the knowledge graph and the corpus as input. The model provides an additional integration of user intent along with text generation, trained with a multi-task learning paradigm along with an additional regularization technique to penalize generating the wrong entity as output. The model further incorporates a Knowledge Graph entity lookup during inference to guarantee the generated output is state-full based on the local knowledge graph provided. We finally evaluated the model using the BLEU score, empirical ...

SUMBT+LaRL: End-to-end Neural Task-oriented Dialog System with Reinforcement Learning

ArXiv, 2020

The recent advent of neural approaches for developing each dialog component in task-oriented dialog systems has remarkably improved, yet optimizing the overall system performance remains a challenge. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end trainable neural dialog system with reinforcement learning, named SUMBT+LaRL. The SUMBT+ estimates user-acts as well as dialog belief states, and the LaRL models latent system action spaces and generates responses given the estimated contexts. We experimentally demonstrate that the training framework in which the SUMBT+ and LaRL are separately pretrained and then the entire system is fine-tuned significantly increases dialog success rates. We propose new success criteria for reinforcement learning to the end-to-end dialog system as well as provide experimental analysis on a different result aspect depending on the success criteria and evaluation methods. Consequently, our model achieved the new state-of-the-art success rate of 85.4% on corpus-base...

ViWOZ: A Multi-Domain Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems Dataset For Low-resource Language

arXiv (Cornell University), 2022

Most of the current task-oriented dialogue systems (ToD), despite having interesting results, are designed for a handful of languages like Chinese and English. Therefore, their performance in low-resource languages is still a significant problem due to the absence of a standard dataset and evaluation policy. To address this problem, we proposed ViWOZ, a fully-annotated Vietnamese task-oriented dialogue dataset. ViWOZ is the first multi-turn, multi-domain tasked oriented dataset in Vietnamese, a low-resource language. The dataset consists of a total of 5,000 dialogues, including 60,946 fully annotated utterances. Furthermore, we provide a comprehensive benchmark of both modular and end-to-end models in lowresource language scenarios. With those characteristics, the ViWOZ dataset enables future studies on creating a multilingual task-oriented dialogue system.

Self-Attentional Models Application in Task-Oriented Dialogue Generation Systems

Proceedings - Natural Language Processing in a Deep Learning World

Self-attentional models are a new paradigm for sequence modelling tasks which differ from common sequence modelling methods, such as recurrencebased and convolution-based sequence learning, in the way that their architecture is only based on the attention mechanism. Self-attentional models have been used in the creation of the state-of-the-art models in many NLP tasks such as neural machine translation, but their usage has not been explored for the task of training end-toend task-oriented dialogue generation systems yet. In this study, we apply these models on the three different datasets for training task-oriented chatbots. Our finding shows that self-attentional models can be exploited to create end-to-end taskoriented chatbots which not only achieve higher evaluation scores compared to recurrence-based models, but also do so more efficiently.