Longfei Yang


2022

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Multi-Domain Dialogue State Tracking with Top-K Slot Self Attention
Longfei Yang | Jiyi Li | Sheng Li | Takahiro Shinozaki
Proceedings of the 23rd Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue

As an important component of task-oriented dialogue systems, dialogue state tracking is designed to track the dialogue state through the conversations between users and systems. Multi-domain dialogue state tracking is a challenging task, in which the correlation among different domains and slots needs to consider. Recently, slot self-attention is proposed to provide a data-driven manner to handle it. However, a full-support slot self-attention may involve redundant information interchange. In this paper, we propose a top-k attention-based slot self-attention for multi-domain dialogue state tracking. In the slot self-attention layers, we force each slot to involve information from the other k prominent slots and mask the rest out. The experimental results on two mainstream multi-domain task-oriented dialogue datasets, MultiWOZ 2.0 and MultiWOZ 2.4, present that our proposed approach is effective to improve the performance of multi-domain dialogue state tracking. We also find that the best result is obtained when each slot interchanges information with only a few slots.