9 research outputs found
Robust Dialog State Tracking for Large Ontologies
The Dialog State Tracking Challenge 4 (DSTC 4) differentiates itself from the
previous three editions as follows: the number of slot-value pairs present in
the ontology is much larger, no spoken language understanding output is given,
and utterances are labeled at the subdialog level. This paper describes a novel
dialog state tracking method designed to work robustly under these conditions,
using elaborate string matching, coreference resolution tailored for dialogs
and a few other improvements. The method can correctly identify many values
that are not explicitly present in the utterance. On the final evaluation, our
method came in first among 7 competing teams and 24 entries. The F1-score
achieved by our method was 9 and 7 percentage points higher than that of the
runner-up for the utterance-level evaluation and for the subdialog-level
evaluation, respectively.Comment: Paper accepted at IWSDS 201
Retrieval-based Goal-Oriented Dialogue Generation
Most research on dialogue has focused either on dialogue generation for
openended chit chat or on state tracking for goal-directed dialogue. In this
work, we explore a hybrid approach to goal-oriented dialogue generation that
combines retrieval from past history with a hierarchical, neural
encoder-decoder architecture. We evaluate this approach in the customer support
domain using the Multiwoz dataset (Budzianowski et al., 2018). We show that
adding this retrieval step to a hierarchical, neural encoder-decoder
architecture leads to significant improvements, including responses that are
rated more appropriate and fluent by human evaluators. Finally, we compare our
retrieval-based model to various semantically conditioned models explicitly
using past dialog act information, and find that our proposed model is
competitive with the current state of the art (Chen et al., 2019), while not
requiring explicit labels about past machine acts
A Survey of Available Corpora For Building Data-Driven Dialogue Systems: The Journal Version
During the past decade, several areas of speech and language understanding have witnessed substantial breakthroughs from the use of data-driven models. In the area of dialogue systems, the trend is less obvious, and most practical systems are still built through significant engineering and expert knowledge. Nevertheless, several recent results suggest that data-driven approaches are feasible and quite promising. To facilitate research in this area, we have carried out a wide survey of publicly available datasets suitable for data-driven learning of dialogue systems. We discuss important characteristics of these datasets, how they can be used to learn diverse dialogue strategies, and their other potential uses. We also examine methods for transfer learning between datasets and the use of external knowledge. Finally, we discuss appropriate choice of evaluation metrics for the learning objective