Task-Oriented Dialogue (TOD) systems have become crucial components in interactive artificial intelligence applications. While recent advances have capitalized on pre-trained language models (PLMs), they exhibit limitations regarding transparency and controllability. To address these challenges, we propose a novel approach focusing on inferring the TOD-Flow graph from dialogue data annotated with dialog acts, uncovering the underlying task structure in the form of a graph. The inferred TOD-Flow graph can be easily integrated with any dialogue model to improve its prediction performance, transparency, and controllability. Our TOD-Flow graph learns what a model can, should, and should not predict, effectively reducing the search space and providing a rationale for the model's prediction. We show that the proposed TOD-Flow graph better resembles human-annotated graphs compared to prior approaches. Furthermore, when combined with several dialogue policies and end-to-end dialogue models, we demonstrate that our approach significantly improves dialog act classification and end-to-end response generation performance in the MultiWOZ and SGD benchmarks. Code available at: https://github.com/srsohn/TOD-Flow
@article{arxiv.2312.04668,
title = {TOD-Flow: Modeling the Structure of Task-Oriented Dialogues},
author = {Sungryull Sohn and Yiwei Lyu and Anthony Liu and Lajanugen Logeswaran and Dong-Ki Kim and Dongsub Shim and Honglak Lee},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2312.04668},
year = {2023}
}