Related papers: Scalable Neural Dialogue State Tracking
Dialogue management (DM) decides the next action of a dialogue system according to the current dialogue state, and thus plays a central role in task-oriented dialogue systems. Since dialogue management requires to have access to not only…
Previous zero-shot dialogue state tracking (DST) methods only apply transfer learning, ignoring unlabelled data in the target domain. We transform zero-shot DST into few-shot DST by utilising such unlabelled data via joint and self-training…
Dialogue state trackers have made significant progress on benchmark datasets, but their generalization capability to novel and realistic scenarios beyond the held-out conversations is less understood. We propose controllable counterfactuals…
An ideal dialogue system requires continuous skill acquisition and adaptation to new tasks while retaining prior knowledge. Dialogue State Tracking (DST), vital in these systems, often involves learning new services and confronting…
Prompt-based methods with large pre-trained language models (PLMs) have shown impressive unaided performance across many NLP tasks. These models improve even further with the addition of a few labeled in-context exemplars to guide output…
In a human-machine dialog scenario, deciding the appropriate time for the machine to take the turn is an open research problem. In contrast, humans engaged in conversations are able to timely decide when to interrupt the speaker for…
This paper introduces one of our group's work on the Dialog System Technology Challenges 8 (DSTC8), the SPPD system for Schema Guided dialogue state tracking challenge. This challenge, named as Track 4 in DSTC8, provides a brand new and…
There has been a significant research interest in employing large language models to empower intelligent robots with complex reasoning. Existing work focuses on harnessing their abilities to reason about the histories of their actions and…
Virtual assistants such as Google Assistant, Alexa and Siri provide a conversational interface to a large number of services and APIs spanning multiple domains. Such systems need to support an ever-increasing number of services with…
Spoken language understanding (SLU) is an essential component in conversational systems. Most SLU component treats each utterance independently, and then the following components aggregate the multi-turn information in the separate phases.…
Generalising dialogue state tracking (DST) to new data is especially challenging due to the strong reliance on abundant and fine-grained supervision during training. Sample sparsity, distributional shift and the occurrence of new concepts…
Stochastic sampling strategies such as top-k and top-p have been widely used in dialogue generation task. However, as an open-domain chatting system, there will be two different conversation scenarios, i.e. chit-chat and knowledge-based…
This paper gives an overview of the Schema-Guided Dialogue State Tracking task of the 8th Dialogue System Technology Challenge. The goal of this task is to develop dialogue state tracking models suitable for large-scale virtual assistants,…
Dialogue act annotations are important to improve response generation quality in task-oriented dialogue systems. However, it can be challenging to use dialogue acts to control response generation in a generalizable way because different…
RST-based discourse parsing is an important NLP task with numerous downstream applications, such as summarization, machine translation and opinion mining. In this paper, we demonstrate a simple, yet highly accurate discourse parser,…
Spoken language understanding (SLU) is an essential component in conversational systems. Considering that contexts provide informative cues for better understanding, history can be leveraged for contextual SLU. However, most prior work only…
Augmentation of task-oriented dialogues has followed standard methods used for plain-text such as back-translation, word-level manipulation, and paraphrasing despite its richly annotated structure. In this work, we introduce an augmentation…
As a key component in a dialogue system, dialogue state tracking plays an important role. It is very important for dialogue state tracking to deal with the problem of unknown slot values. As far as we known, almost all existing approaches…
The task of dialog management is commonly decomposed into two sequential subtasks: dialog state tracking and dialog policy learning. In an end-to-end dialog system, the aim of dialog state tracking is to accurately estimate the true dialog…
With the advent of conversational assistants, like Amazon Alexa, Google Now, etc., dialogue systems are gaining a lot of traction, especially in industrial setting. These systems typically consist of Spoken Language understanding component…