Zhang Ting


2023

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Improving Zero-shot Cross-lingual Dialogue State Tracking via Contrastive Learning
Xiang Yu | Zhang Ting | Di Hui | Huang Hui | Li Chunyou | Ouchi Kazushige | Chen Yufeng | Xu Jinan
Proceedings of the 22nd Chinese National Conference on Computational Linguistics

“Recent works in dialogue state tracking (DST) focus on a handful of languages, as collectinglarge-scale manually annotated data in different languages is expensive. Existing models addressthis issue by code-switched data augmentation or intermediate fine-tuning of multilingual pre-trained models. However, these models can only perform implicit alignment across languages. In this paper, we propose a novel model named Contrastive Learning for Cross-Lingual DST(CLCL-DST) to enhance zero-shot cross-lingual adaptation. Specifically, we use a self-builtbilingual dictionary for lexical substitution to construct multilingual views of the same utterance. Then our approach leverages fine-grained contrastive learning to encourage representations ofspecific slot tokens in different views to be more similar than negative example pairs. By thismeans, CLCL-DST aligns similar words across languages into a more refined language-invariantspace. In addition, CLCL-DST uses a significance-based keyword extraction approach to selecttask-related words to build the bilingual dictionary for better cross-lingual positive examples. Experiment results on Multilingual WoZ 2.0 and parallel MultiWoZ 2.1 datasets show that ourproposed CLCL-DST outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods by a large margin, demon-strating the effectiveness of CLCL-DST.”