Knowledge-Driven Slot Constraints for Goal-Oriented Dialogue Systems

Piyawat Lertvittayakumjorn, Daniele Bonadiman, Saab Mansour


Abstract
In goal-oriented dialogue systems, users provide information through slot values to achieve specific goals. Practically, some combinations of slot values can be invalid according to external knowledge. For example, a combination of “cheese pizza” (a menu item) and “oreo cookies” (a topping) from an input utterance “Can I order a cheese pizza with oreo cookies on top?” exemplifies such invalid combinations according to the menu of a restaurant business. Traditional dialogue systems allow execution of validation rules as a post-processing step after slots have been filled which can lead to error accumulation. In this paper, we formalize knowledge-driven slot constraints and present a new task of constraint violation detection accompanied with benchmarking data. Then, we propose methods to integrate the external knowledge into the system and model constraint violation detection as an end-to-end classification task and compare it to the traditional rule-based pipeline approach. Experiments on two domains of the MultiDoGO dataset reveal challenges of constraint violation detection and sets the stage for future work and improvements.
Anthology ID:
2021.naacl-main.266
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies
Month:
June
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3407–3419
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.naacl-main.266
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.naacl-main.266
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Piyawat Lertvittayakumjorn, Daniele Bonadiman, and Saab Mansour. 2021. Knowledge-Driven Slot Constraints for Goal-Oriented Dialogue Systems. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, pages 3407–3419, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Knowledge-Driven Slot Constraints for Goal-Oriented Dialogue Systems (Lertvittayakumjorn et al., NAACL 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-script-update/2021.naacl-main.266.pdf
Video:
 https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-script-update/2021.naacl-main.266.mp4
Code
 amazon-research/nlu-slot-constraints