@inproceedings{mehri-eskenazi-2021-schema,
    title = "Schema-Guided Paradigm for Zero-Shot Dialog",
    author = "Mehri, Shikib  and
      Eskenazi, Maxine",
    editor = "Li, Haizhou  and
      Levow, Gina-Anne  and
      Yu, Zhou  and
      Gupta, Chitralekha  and
      Sisman, Berrak  and
      Cai, Siqi  and
      Vandyke, David  and
      Dethlefs, Nina  and
      Wu, Yan  and
      Li, Junyi Jessy",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 22nd Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue",
    month = jul,
    year = "2021",
    address = "Singapore and Online",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/add-emnlp-2024-awards/2021.sigdial-1.52/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2021.sigdial-1.52",
    pages = "499--508",
    abstract = "Developing mechanisms that flexibly adapt dialog systems to unseen tasks and domains is a major challenge in dialog research. Neural models implicitly memorize task-specific dialog policies from the training data. We posit that this implicit memorization has precluded zero-shot transfer learning. To this end, we leverage the schema-guided paradigm, wherein the task-specific dialog policy is explicitly provided to the model. We introduce the Schema Attention Model (SAM) and improved schema representations for the STAR corpus. SAM obtains significant improvement in zero-shot settings, with a +22 F1 score improvement over prior work. These results validate the feasibility of zero-shot generalizability in dialog. Ablation experiments are also presented to demonstrate the efficacy of SAM."
}