@inproceedings{budzianowski-vulic-2019-hello,
    title = "Hello, It{'}s {GPT}-2 - How Can {I} Help You? Towards the Use of Pretrained Language Models for Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems",
    author = "Budzianowski, Pawe{\l}  and
      Vuli{\'c}, Ivan",
    editor = "Birch, Alexandra  and
      Finch, Andrew  and
      Hayashi, Hiroaki  and
      Konstas, Ioannis  and
      Luong, Thang  and
      Neubig, Graham  and
      Oda, Yusuke  and
      Sudoh, Katsuhito",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Neural Generation and Translation",
    month = nov,
    year = "2019",
    address = "Hong Kong",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/iwcs-25-ingestion/D19-5602/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/D19-5602",
    pages = "15--22",
    abstract = "Data scarcity is a long-standing and crucial challenge that hinders quick development of task-oriented dialogue systems across multiple domains: task-oriented dialogue models are expected to learn grammar, syntax, dialogue reasoning, decision making, and language generation from absurdly small amounts of task-specific data. In this paper, we demonstrate that recent progress in language modeling pre-training and transfer learning shows promise to overcome this problem. We propose a task-oriented dialogue model that operates solely on text input: it effectively bypasses explicit policy and language generation modules. Building on top of the TransferTransfo framework (Wolf et al., 2019) and generative model pre-training (Radford et al., 2019), we validate the approach on complex multi-domain task-oriented dialogues from the MultiWOZ dataset. Our automatic and human evaluations show that the proposed model is on par with a strong task-specific neural baseline. In the long run, our approach holds promise to mitigate the data scarcity problem, and to support the construction of more engaging and more eloquent task-oriented conversational agents."
}