AnyTOD: A Programmable Task-Oriented Dialog System
Jeffrey Zhao, Yuan Cao, Raghav Gupta, Harrison Lee, Abhinav Rastogi, Mingqiu Wang, Hagen Soltau, Izhak Shafran, Yonghui Wu
Abstract
We propose AnyTOD, an end-to-end, zero-shot task-oriented dialog (TOD) system capable of zero-shot adaptation onto unseen tasks or domains. We view TOD as a program executed by a language model (LM), where program logic and ontology is provided by a designer as a schema. To enable generalization to unseen schemas and programs without prior training, AnyTOD adopts a neuro-symbolic approach. A neural LM keeps track of events that occur during a conversation, and a symbolic program implementing dialog policy is executed to recommend actions AnyTOD should take. This approach drastically reduces data annotation and model training requirements, addressing the enduring challenge of rapidly adapting a TOD system to unseen tasks and domains. We demonstrate state-of-the-art results on STAR, ABCD and SGD benchmarks. We also demonstrate strong zero-shot transfer ability in low-resource settings, such as zero-shot transfer onto MultiWOZ. In addition, we release STARv2, an updated version of the STAR dataset with richer annotations, for benchmarking zero-shot task transfer for end-to-end TOD models.- Anthology ID:
- 2023.emnlp-main.1006
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
- Month:
- December
- Year:
- 2023
- Address:
- Singapore
- Editors:
- Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
- Venue:
- EMNLP
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 16189–16204
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.1006
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.1006
- Cite (ACL):
- Jeffrey Zhao, Yuan Cao, Raghav Gupta, Harrison Lee, Abhinav Rastogi, Mingqiu Wang, Hagen Soltau, Izhak Shafran, and Yonghui Wu. 2023. AnyTOD: A Programmable Task-Oriented Dialog System. In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 16189–16204, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- AnyTOD: A Programmable Task-Oriented Dialog System (Zhao et al., EMNLP 2023)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/add_acl24_videos/2023.emnlp-main.1006.pdf