Prompt Learning for Domain Adaptation in Task-Oriented Dialogue

Makesh Narsimhan Sreedhar, Christopher Parisien


Abstract
Conversation designers continue to face significant obstacles when creating productionquality task-oriented dialogue systems. The complexity and cost involved in schema development and data collection is often a major barrier for such designers, limiting their ability to create natural, user-friendly experiences. We frame the classification of user intent as the generation of a canonical form, a lightweight semantic representation using natural language. We show that canonical forms offer a promising alternative to traditional methods for intent classification. By tuning soft prompts for a frozen large language model, we show that canonical forms generalize very well to new, unseen domains in a zero- or few-shot setting. The method is also sample-efficient, reducing the complexity and effort of developing new task-oriented dialogue domains.
Anthology ID:
2022.seretod-1.4
Volume:
Proceedings of the Towards Semi-Supervised and Reinforced Task-Oriented Dialog Systems (SereTOD)
Month:
December
Year:
2022
Address:
Abu Dhabi, Beijing (Hybrid)
Editors:
Zhijian Ou, Junlan Feng, Juanzi Li
Venue:
SereTOD
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
24–30
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.seretod-1.4
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.seretod-1.4
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Makesh Narsimhan Sreedhar and Christopher Parisien. 2022. Prompt Learning for Domain Adaptation in Task-Oriented Dialogue. In Proceedings of the Towards Semi-Supervised and Reinforced Task-Oriented Dialog Systems (SereTOD), pages 24–30, Abu Dhabi, Beijing (Hybrid). Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Prompt Learning for Domain Adaptation in Task-Oriented Dialogue (Sreedhar & Parisien, SereTOD 2022)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/add_acl24_videos/2022.seretod-1.4.pdf
Video:
 https://preview.aclanthology.org/add_acl24_videos/2022.seretod-1.4.mp4