TOD-Flow: Modeling the Structure of Task-Oriented Dialogues
Sungryull Sohn, Yiwei Lyu, Anthony Liu, Lajanugen Logeswaran, Dong-Ki Kim, Dongsub Shim, Honglak Lee
Abstract
Task-Oriented Dialogue (TOD) systems have become crucial components in interactive artificial intelligence applications. While recent advances have capitalized on pre-trained language models (PLMs), they exhibit limitations regarding transparency and controllability. To address these challenges, we propose a novel approach focusing on inferring the TOD-flow graph from dialogue data annotated with dialog acts, uncovering the underlying task structure in the form of a graph. The inferred TOD-flow graph can be easily integrated with any dialogue model to improve its prediction performance, transparency, and controllability. Our TOD-flow graph learns what a model can, should, and should not predict, effectively reducing the search space and providing a rationale for the model’s prediction. We show that the proposed TOD-flow graph better resemble human-annotated graphs compared to prior approaches. Furthermore, when combined with several dialogue policies and end-to-end dialogue models, we demonstrate that our approach significantly improves dialog act classification and end-to-end response generation performance in the MultiWOZ and SGD benchmarks.- Anthology ID:
- 2023.emnlp-main.204
- 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:
- 3355–3371
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.204
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.204
- Cite (ACL):
- Sungryull Sohn, Yiwei Lyu, Anthony Liu, Lajanugen Logeswaran, Dong-Ki Kim, Dongsub Shim, and Honglak Lee. 2023. TOD-Flow: Modeling the Structure of Task-Oriented Dialogues. In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 3355–3371, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- TOD-Flow: Modeling the Structure of Task-Oriented Dialogues (Sohn et al., EMNLP 2023)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/corrections-2024-07/2023.emnlp-main.204.pdf