Related papers: OPAL: Ontology-Aware Pretrained Language Model for…

Pre-trained language models have achieved huge improvement on many NLP tasks. However, these methods are usually designed for written text, so they do not consider the properties of spoken language. Therefore, this paper aims at…

Dialog state tracking (DST) is a core component in task-oriented dialog systems. Existing approaches for DST mainly fall into one of two categories, namely, ontology-based and ontology-free methods. An ontology-based method selects a value…

Dialogue data in real scenarios tend to be sparsely available, rendering data-starved end-to-end dialogue systems trained inadequately. We discover that data utilization efficiency in low-resource scenarios can be enhanced by mining…

Dialogue state tracking, which estimates user goals and requests given the dialogue context, is an essential part of task-oriented dialogue systems. In this paper, we propose the Global-Locally Self-Attentive Dialogue State Tracker (GLAD),…

Training task-oriented dialogue systems typically requires turn-level annotations for interacting with their APIs: e.g. a dialogue state and the system actions taken at each step. These annotations can be costly to produce, error-prone, and…

Existing studies in dialogue system research mostly treat task-oriented dialogue and chit-chat as separate domains. Towards building a human-like assistant that can converse naturally and seamlessly with users, it is important to build a…

Discourse processing suffers from data sparsity, especially for dialogues. As a result, we explore approaches to build discourse structures for dialogues, based on attention matrices from Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs). We investigate…

Modern task-oriented dialogue (TOD) systems increasingly rely on large language model (LLM) agents, leveraging Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and long-context capabilities for long-term memory utilization. However, these methods are…

Pretrained language models (PLMs) trained on large-scale unlabeled corpus are typically fine-tuned on task-specific downstream datasets, which have produced state-of-the-art results on various NLP tasks. However, the data discrepancy issue…

The training of spoken language understanding (SLU) models often faces the problem of data scarcity. In this paper, we put forward a data augmentation method using pretrained language models to boost the variability and accuracy of…

This work combines information about the dialogue history encoded by pre-trained model with a meaning representation of the current system utterance to realize contextual language generation in task-oriented dialogues. We utilize the…

We present a novel approach to dialogue state tracking and referring expression resolution tasks. Successful contextual understanding of multi-turn spoken dialogues requires resolving referring expressions across turns and tracking the…

Dialogue Policy Learning is a key component in a task-oriented dialogue system (TDS) that decides the next action of the system given the dialogue state at each turn. Reinforcement Learning (RL) is commonly chosen to learn the dialogue…

In this paper, we present a deep reinforcement learning (RL) framework for iterative dialog policy optimization in end-to-end task-oriented dialog systems. Popular approaches in learning dialog policy with RL include letting a dialog agent…

The prevailing paradigm for improving large language models relies on offline training with human annotations or simulated environments, leaving the rich experience accumulated during real-world deployment entirely unexploited. We propose…

End-to-end generation-based approaches have been investigated and applied in task-oriented dialogue systems. However, in industrial scenarios, existing methods face the bottlenecks of controllability (e.g., domain-inconsistent responses,…

In this work, we present a hybrid learning method for training task-oriented dialogue systems through online user interactions. Popular methods for learning task-oriented dialogues include applying reinforcement learning with user feedback…

We propose a novel methodology to address dialog learning in the context of goal-oriented conversational systems. The key idea is to quantize the dialog space into clusters and create a language model across the clusters, thus allowing for…

The goal of building intelligent dialogue systems has largely been separately pursued under two paradigms: task-oriented dialogue (TOD) systems, which perform goal-oriented functions, and open-domain dialogue (ODD) systems, which focus on…

Task-oriented dialog (TOD) systems facilitate users in accomplishing complex, multi-turn tasks through natural language. While instruction-tuned large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong performance on a range of single-turn NLP…