In embodied instruction-following (EIF), the integration of pretrained language models (LMs) as task planners emerges as a significant branch, where tasks are planned at the skill level by prompting LMs with pretrained skills and user instructions. However, grounding these pretrained skills in different domains remains challenging due to their intricate entanglement with the domain-specific knowledge. To address this challenge, we present a semantic skill grounding (SemGro) framework that leverages the hierarchical nature of semantic skills. SemGro recognizes the broad spectrum of these skills, ranging from short-horizon low-semantic skills that are universally applicable across domains to long-horizon rich-semantic skills that are highly specialized and tailored for particular domains. The framework employs an iterative skill decomposition approach, starting from the higher levels of semantic skill hierarchy and then moving downwards, so as to ground each planned skill to an executable level within the target domain. To do so, we use the reasoning capabilities of LMs for composing and decomposing semantic skills, as well as their multi-modal extension for assessing the skill feasibility in the target domain. Our experiments in the VirtualHome benchmark show the efficacy of SemGro in 300 cross-domain EIF scenarios.

The goal-oriented dialogue system needs to be optimized for tracking the dialogue flow and carrying out an effective conversation under various situations to meet the user goal. The traditional approach to build such a dialogue system is to take a pipelined modular architecture, where its modules are optimized individually. However, such an optimization scheme does not necessarily yield the overall performance improvement of the whole system. On the other hand, end-to-end dialogue systems with monolithic neural architecture are often trained only with input-output utterances, without taking into account the entire annotations available in the corpus. This scheme makes it difficult for goal-oriented dialogues where the system needs to integrate with external systems or to provide interpretable information about why the system generated a particular response. In this paper, we present an end-to-end neural architecture for dialogue systems that addresses both challenges above. In the human evaluation, our dialogue system achieved the success rate of 68.32%, the language understanding score of 4.149, and the response appropriateness score of 4.287, which ranked the system at the top position in the end-to-end multi-domain dialogue system task in the 8th dialogue systems technology challenge (DSTC8).

We present PyOpenDial, a Python-based domain-independent, open-source toolkit for spoken dialogue systems. Recent advances in core components of dialogue systems, such as speech recognition, language understanding, dialogue management, and language generation, harness deep learning to achieve state-of-the-art performance. The original OpenDial, implemented in Java, provides a plugin architecture to integrate external modules, but lacks Python bindings, making it difficult to interface with popular deep learning frameworks such as Tensorflow or PyTorch. To this end, we re-implemented OpenDial in Python and extended the toolkit with a number of novel functionalities for neural dialogue state tracking and action planning. We describe the overall architecture and its extensions, and illustrate their use on an example where the system response model is implemented with a recurrent neural network.