During task-oriented dialogues (TODs), human users naturally introduce chitchat that is beyond the immediate scope of the task, interfering with the flow of the conversation. To address this issue without the need for expensive manual data creation, we use few-shot prompting with Llama-2-70B to enhance the MultiWOZ dataset with user backstories, a typical example of chitchat interference in TODs. We assess the impact of this addition by testing two models: one trained solely on TODs and another trained on TODs with a preliminary chitchat interaction. Our analysis demonstrates that our enhanced dataset poses a challenge for these systems. Moreover, we demonstrate that our dataset can be effectively used for training purposes, enabling a system to consistently acknowledge the user’s backstory while also successfully moving the task forward in the same turn, as confirmed by human evaluation. These findings highlight the benefits of generating novel chitchat-TOD scenarios to test TOD systems more thoroughly and improve their resilience to natural user interferences.

Large language models (LLMs) tuned for chat have recently been adopted for few-shot end-to-end task-oriented dialogue (TOD), with some success. To further assess this method, we conduct experiments on two, more complex, task-oriented benchmarks that integrate elements of chitchat into the conversation. We enhance a few-shot baseline by adding zero-shot chitchat detection and implementing function calling for dialogue state tracking (DST). We focus on this step in the task-oriented pipeline as it comes first, and errors due to added chitchat at this stage have the most impact on end-to-end performance. We find that this prompting method shows increased resilience to mixed-mode inputs and our enhanced pipeline allows for natural inter-mode conversations, as assessed through human evaluation. Our findings also suggest that the performance gap between few-shot prompting for TOD and supervised task-specific models is narrowing.

Position paper on the intersection between chitchat and task-oriented dialogues (TODs), with a focus on integrating capabilities typically associated with chitchat systems into task-oriented agents.

Although general question answering has been well explored in recent years, temporal question answering is a task which has not received as much focus. Our work aims to leverage a popular approach used for general question answering, answer extraction, in order to find answers to temporal questions within a paragraph. To train our model, we propose a new dataset, inspired by SQuAD, a state-of-the-art question answering corpus, specifically tailored to provide rich temporal information by adapting the corpus WikiWars, which contains several documents on history’s greatest conflicts. Our evaluation shows that a pattern matching deep learning model, often used in general question answering, can be adapted to temporal question answering, if we accept to ask questions whose answers must be directly present within a text.