Correctable-DST: Mitigating Historical Context Mismatch between Training and Inference for Improved Dialogue State Tracking
Hongyan Xie, Haoxiang Su, Shuangyong Song, Hao Huang, Bo Zou, Kun Deng, Jianghua Lin, Zhihui Zhang, Xiaodong He
Abstract
Recently proposed dialogue state tracking (DST) approaches predict the dialogue state of a target turn sequentially based on the previous dialogue state. During the training time, the ground-truth previous dialogue state is utilized as the historical context. However, only the previously predicted dialogue state can be used in inference. This discrepancy might lead to error propagation, i.e., mistakes made by the model in the current turn are likely to be carried over to the following turns. To solve this problem, we propose Correctable Dialogue State Tracking (Correctable-DST). Specifically, it consists of three stages: (1) a Predictive State Simulator is exploited to generate a previously “predicted” dialogue state based on the ground-truth previous dialogue state during training; (2) a Slot Detector is proposed to determine the slots with an incorrect value in the previously “predicted” state and the slots whose values are to be updated in the current turn; (3) a State Generator takes the name of the above-selected slots as a prompt to generate the current state. Empirical results show that our approach achieves 67.51%, 68.24%, 70.30%, 71.38%, and 81.27% joint goal accuracy on MultiWOZ 2.0-2.4 datasets, respectively, and achieves a new state-of-the-art performance with significant improvements.- Anthology ID:
- 2022.emnlp-main.56
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
- Month:
- December
- Year:
- 2022
- Address:
- Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
- Editors:
- Yoav Goldberg, Zornitsa Kozareva, Yue Zhang
- Venue:
- EMNLP
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 876–889
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2022.emnlp-main.56
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2022.emnlp-main.56
- Cite (ACL):
- Hongyan Xie, Haoxiang Su, Shuangyong Song, Hao Huang, Bo Zou, Kun Deng, Jianghua Lin, Zhihui Zhang, and Xiaodong He. 2022. Correctable-DST: Mitigating Historical Context Mismatch between Training and Inference for Improved Dialogue State Tracking. In Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 876–889, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Correctable-DST: Mitigating Historical Context Mismatch between Training and Inference for Improved Dialogue State Tracking (Xie et al., EMNLP 2022)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-2023-videos/2022.emnlp-main.56.pdf