A Survey on Recent Advances in LLM-Based Multi-turn Dialogue Systems

This survey provides a comprehensive review of research on multi-turn dialogue systems, with a particular focus on multi-turn dialogue systems based on large language models (LLMs). This paper aims to (a) give a summary of existing LLMs and approaches for adapting LLMs to downstream tasks; (b) elaborate recent advances in multi-turn dialogue systems, covering both LLM-based open-domain dialogue (ODD) and task-oriented dialogue (TOD) systems, along with datasets and evaluation metrics; (c) discuss some future emphasis and recent research problems arising from the development of LLMs and the increasing demands on multi-turn dialogue systems.Comment: 35 pages, 10 figures, ACM Computing Survey

A Controllable Model of Grounded Response Generation

Current end-to-end neural conversation models inherently lack the flexibility to impose semantic control in the response generation process, often resulting in uninteresting responses. Attempts to boost informativeness alone come at the expense of factual accuracy, as attested by pretrained language models' propensity to "hallucinate" facts. While this may be mitigated by access to background knowledge, there is scant guarantee of relevance and informativeness in generated responses. We propose a framework that we call controllable grounded response generation (CGRG), in which lexical control phrases are either provided by a user or automatically extracted by a control phrase predictor from dialogue context and grounding knowledge. Quantitative and qualitative results show that, using this framework, a transformer based model with a novel inductive attention mechanism, trained on a conversation-like Reddit dataset, outperforms strong generation baselines.Comment: AAAI 202

End-to-end Task-oriented Dialogue: A Survey of Tasks, Methods, and Future Directions

End-to-end task-oriented dialogue (EToD) can directly generate responses in an end-to-end fashion without modular training, which attracts escalating popularity. The advancement of deep neural networks, especially the successful use of large pre-trained models, has further led to significant progress in EToD research in recent years. In this paper, we present a thorough review and provide a unified perspective to summarize existing approaches as well as recent trends to advance the development of EToD research. The contributions of this paper can be summarized: (1) \textbf{\textit{First survey}}: to our knowledge, we take the first step to present a thorough survey of this research field; (2) \textbf{\textit{New taxonomy}}: we first introduce a unified perspective for EToD, including (i) \textit{Modularly EToD} and (ii) \textit{Fully EToD}; (3) \textbf{\textit{New Frontiers}}: we discuss some potential frontier areas as well as the corresponding challenges, hoping to spur breakthrough research in EToD field; (4) \textbf{\textit{Abundant resources}}: we build a public website\footnote{We collect the related papers, baseline projects, and leaderboards for the community at \url{https://etods.net/}.}, where EToD researchers could directly access the recent progress. We hope this work can serve as a thorough reference for the EToD research community.Comment: Accepted at EMNLP202

Are LLMs All You Need for Task-Oriented Dialogue?

Instructions-tuned Large Language Models (LLMs) gained recently huge popularity thanks to their ability to interact with users through conversation. In this work we aim to evaluate their ability to complete multi-turn tasks and interact with external databases in the context of established task-oriented dialogue benchmarks. We show that for explicit belief state tracking, LLMs underperform compared to specialized task-specific models. Nevertheless, they show ability to guide the dialogue to successful ending if given correct slot values. Furthermore this ability improves with access to true belief state distribution or in-domain examples