Neural Belief Tracker: Data-Driven Dialogue State Tracking
Nikola Mrkšić, Diarmuid Ó Séaghdha, Tsung-Hsien Wen, Blaise Thomson, Steve Young
Abstract
One of the core components of modern spoken dialogue systems is the belief tracker, which estimates the user’s goal at every step of the dialogue. However, most current approaches have difficulty scaling to larger, more complex dialogue domains. This is due to their dependency on either: a) Spoken Language Understanding models that require large amounts of annotated training data; or b) hand-crafted lexicons for capturing some of the linguistic variation in users’ language. We propose a novel Neural Belief Tracking (NBT) framework which overcomes these problems by building on recent advances in representation learning. NBT models reason over pre-trained word vectors, learning to compose them into distributed representations of user utterances and dialogue context. Our evaluation on two datasets shows that this approach surpasses past limitations, matching the performance of state-of-the-art models which rely on hand-crafted semantic lexicons and outperforming them when such lexicons are not provided.- Anthology ID:
- P17-1163
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
- Month:
- July
- Year:
- 2017
- Address:
- Vancouver, Canada
- Venue:
- ACL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 1777–1788
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/P17-1163
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/P17-1163
- Cite (ACL):
- Nikola Mrkšić, Diarmuid Ó Séaghdha, Tsung-Hsien Wen, Blaise Thomson, and Steve Young. 2017. Neural Belief Tracker: Data-Driven Dialogue State Tracking. In Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 1777–1788, Vancouver, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Neural Belief Tracker: Data-Driven Dialogue State Tracking (Mrkšić et al., ACL 2017)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-script-update/P17-1163.pdf
- Data
- Wizard-of-Oz, Dialogue State Tracking Challenge