@inproceedings{gu-etal-2021-pral,
    title = "{PRAL}: A Tailored Pre-Training Model for Task-Oriented Dialog Generation",
    author = "Gu, Jing  and
      Wu, Qingyang  and
      Wu, Chongruo  and
      Shi, Weiyan  and
      Yu, Zhou",
    editor = "Zong, Chengqing  and
      Xia, Fei  and
      Li, Wenjie  and
      Navigli, Roberto",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 2: Short Papers)",
    month = aug,
    year = "2021",
    address = "Online",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/jlcl-multiple-ingestion/2021.acl-short.40/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2021.acl-short.40",
    pages = "305--313",
    abstract = "Large pre-trained language generation models such as GPT-2 have demonstrated their effectiveness as language priors by reaching state-of-the-art results in various language generation tasks. However, the performance of pre-trained models on task-oriented dialog tasks is still under-explored. We propose a Pre-trainedRole Alternating Language model (PRAL), explicitly designed for task-oriented conversational systems. We design several techniques: start position randomization, knowledge distillation, and history discount to improve pre-training performance. In addition, we introduce a high-quality large-scale task-oriented dialog pre-training dataset by post-prossessing13 dialog datasets. We effectively adapt PRALon three downstream tasks. The results show that PRAL outperforms or is on par with state-of-the-art models."
}