Alexa Conversations: An Extensible Data-driven Approach for Building Task-oriented Dialogue Systems
Anish Acharya, Suranjit Adhikari, Sanchit Agarwal, Vincent Auvray, Nehal Belgamwar, Arijit Biswas, Shubhra Chandra, Tagyoung Chung, Maryam Fazel-Zarandi, Raefer Gabriel, Shuyang Gao, Rahul Goel, Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Jan Jezabek, Abhay Jha, Jiun-Yu Kao, Prakash Krishnan, Peter Ku, Anuj Goyal, Chien-Wei Lin, Qing Liu, Arindam Mandal, Angeliki Metallinou, Vishal Naik, Yi Pan, Shachi Paul, Vittorio Perera, Abhishek Sethi, Minmin Shen, Nikko Strom, Eddie Wang
Abstract
Traditional goal-oriented dialogue systems rely on various components such as natural language understanding, dialogue state tracking, policy learning and response generation. Training each component requires annotations which are hard to obtain for every new domain, limiting scalability of such systems. Similarly, rule-based dialogue systems require extensive writing and maintenance of rules and do not scale either. End-to-End dialogue systems, on the other hand, do not require module-specific annotations but need a large amount of data for training. To overcome these problems, in this demo, we present Alexa Conversations, a new approach for building goal-oriented dialogue systems that is scalable, extensible as well as data efficient. The components of this system are trained in a data-driven manner, but instead of collecting annotated conversations for training, we generate them using a novel dialogue simulator based on a few seed dialogues and specifications of APIs and entities provided by the developer. Our approach provides out-of-the-box support for natural conversational phenomenon like entity sharing across turns or users changing their mind during conversation without requiring developers to provide any such dialogue flows. We exemplify our approach using a simple pizza ordering task and showcase its value in reducing the developer burden for creating a robust experience. Finally, we evaluate our system using a typical movie ticket booking task integrated with live APIs and show that the dialogue simulator is an essential component of the system that leads to over 50% improvement in turn-level action signature prediction accuracy.- Anthology ID:
- 2021.naacl-demos.15
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies: Demonstrations
- Month:
- June
- Year:
- 2021
- Address:
- Online
- Editors:
- Avi Sil, Xi Victoria Lin
- Venue:
- NAACL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 125–132
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2021.naacl-demos.15
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2021.naacl-demos.15
- Cite (ACL):
- Anish Acharya, Suranjit Adhikari, Sanchit Agarwal, Vincent Auvray, Nehal Belgamwar, Arijit Biswas, Shubhra Chandra, Tagyoung Chung, Maryam Fazel-Zarandi, Raefer Gabriel, Shuyang Gao, Rahul Goel, Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Jan Jezabek, Abhay Jha, Jiun-Yu Kao, Prakash Krishnan, Peter Ku, Anuj Goyal, et al.. 2021. Alexa Conversations: An Extensible Data-driven Approach for Building Task-oriented Dialogue Systems. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies: Demonstrations, pages 125–132, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Alexa Conversations: An Extensible Data-driven Approach for Building Task-oriented Dialogue Systems (Acharya et al., NAACL 2021)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/dois-2013-emnlp/2021.naacl-demos.15.pdf