Building universal dialogue systems that can seamlessly operate across
multiple domains/APIs and generalize to new ones with minimal supervision and
maintenance is a critical challenge. Recent works have leveraged natural
language descriptions for schema elements to enable such systems; however,
descriptions can only indirectly convey schema semantics. In this work, we
propose Show, Don't Tell, a prompt format for seq2seq modeling which uses a
short labeled example dialogue to show the semantics of schema elements rather
than tell the model via descriptions. While requiring similar effort from
service developers, we show that using short examples as schema representations
with large language models results in stronger performance and better
generalization on two popular dialogue state tracking benchmarks: the
Schema-Guided Dialogue dataset and the MultiWoZ leave-one-out benchmark.Comment: To appear at NAACL 202