Existing controllable dialogue generation work focuses on the single-attribute control and lacks generalization capability to out-of-distribution multiple attribute combinations. In this paper, we explore the compositional generalization for multi-attribute controllable dialogue generation where a model can learn from seen attribute values and generalize to unseen combinations. We propose a prompt-based disentangled controllable dialogue generation model, DCG. It learns attribute concept composition by generating attribute-oriented prompt vectors and uses a disentanglement loss to disentangle different attributes for better generalization. Besides, we design a unified reference-free evaluation framework for multiple attributes with different levels of granularities. Experiment results on two benchmarks prove the effectiveness of our method and the evaluation metric.

Detecting Out-of-Domain (OOD) or unknown intents from user queries is essential in a task-oriented dialog system. A key challenge of OOD detection is the overconfidence of neural models. In this paper, we comprehensively analyze overconfidence and classify it into two perspectives: over-confident OOD and in-domain (IND). Then according to intrinsic reasons, we respectively propose a novel reassigned contrastive learning (RCL) to discriminate IND intents for over-confident OOD and an adaptive class-dependent local threshold mechanism to separate similar IND and OOD intents for over-confident IND. Experiments and analyses show the effectiveness of our proposed method for both aspects of overconfidence issues.

The most advanced abstractive dialogue summarizers lack generalization ability on new domains and the existing researches for domain adaptation in summarization generally rely on large-scale pre-trainings. To explore the lightweight fine-tuning methods for domain adaptation of dialogue summarization, in this paper, we propose an efficient and generalizable Domain-Oriented Prefix-tuning model, which utilizes a domain word initialized prefix module to alleviate domain entanglement and adopts discrete prompts to guide the model to focus on key contents of dialogues and enhance model generalization. We conduct zero-shot experiments and build domain adaptation benchmarks on two multi-domain dialogue summarization datasets, TODSum and QMSum. Adequate experiments and qualitative analysis prove the effectiveness of our methods.

Abstractive dialogue summarization suffers from a lots of factual errors, which are due to scattered salient elements in the multi-speaker information interaction process. In this work, we design a heterogeneous semantic slot graph with a slot-level mask cross-attention to enhance the slot features for more correct summarization. We also propose a slot-driven beam search algorithm in the decoding process to give priority to generating salient elements in a limited length by “filling-in-the-blanks”. Besides, an adversarial contrastive learning assisting the training process is introduced to alleviate the exposure bias. Experimental performance on different types of factual errors shows the effectiveness of our methods and human evaluation further verifies the results..

Recently, people have been beginning paying more attention to the abstractive dialogue summarization task. Since the information flows are exchanged between at least two interlocutors and key elements about a certain event are often spanned across multiple utterances, it is necessary for researchers to explore the inherent relations and structures of dialogue contents. However, the existing approaches often process the dialogue with sequence-based models, which are hard to capture long-distance inter-sentence relations. In this paper, we propose a Topic-word Guided Dialogue Graph Attention (TGDGA) network to model the dialogue as an interaction graph according to the topic word information. A masked graph self-attention mechanism is used to integrate cross-sentence information flows and focus more on the related utterances, which makes it better to understand the dialogue. Moreover, the topic word features are introduced to assist the decoding process. We evaluate our model on the SAMSum Corpus and Automobile Master Corpus. The experimental results show that our method outperforms most of the baselines.