Conversational Semantic Parsing for Dialog State Tracking

Jianpeng Cheng, Devang Agrawal, Héctor Martínez Alonso, Shruti Bhargava, Joris Driesen, Federico Flego, Dain Kaplan, Dimitri Kartsaklis, Lin Li, Dhivya Piraviperumal, Jason D. Williams, Hong Yu, Diarmuid Ó Séaghdha, Anders Johannsen


Abstract
We consider a new perspective on dialog state tracking (DST), the task of estimating a user’s goal through the course of a dialog. By formulating DST as a semantic parsing task over hierarchical representations, we can incorporate semantic compositionality, cross-domain knowledge sharing and co-reference. We present TreeDST, a dataset of 27k conversations annotated with tree-structured dialog states and system acts. We describe an encoder-decoder framework for DST with hierarchical representations, which leads to ~20% improvement over state-of-the-art DST approaches that operate on a flat meaning space of slot-value pairs.
Anthology ID:
2020.emnlp-main.651
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)
Month:
November
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Bonnie Webber, Trevor Cohn, Yulan He, Yang Liu
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
8107–8117
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.651
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.emnlp-main.651
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jianpeng Cheng, Devang Agrawal, Héctor Martínez Alonso, Shruti Bhargava, Joris Driesen, Federico Flego, Dain Kaplan, Dimitri Kartsaklis, Lin Li, Dhivya Piraviperumal, Jason D. Williams, Hong Yu, Diarmuid Ó Séaghdha, and Anders Johannsen. 2020. Conversational Semantic Parsing for Dialog State Tracking. In Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), pages 8107–8117, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Conversational Semantic Parsing for Dialog State Tracking (Cheng et al., EMNLP 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/dois-2013-emnlp/2020.emnlp-main.651.pdf
Video:
 https://slideslive.com/38938934
Code
 apple/ml-tree-dst
Data
SGD