@inproceedings{hebeu-yu-2025-cater,
    title = "{C}a{TER}: A Framework for Context-aware Topology Entity Retrieval Contrastive Learning in End-to-End Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems",
    author = "Hebeu, Di Wu  and
      Yu, Zhizhi",
    editor = "Christodoulopoulos, Christos  and
      Chakraborty, Tanmoy  and
      Rose, Carolyn  and
      Peng, Violet",
    booktitle = "Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025",
    month = nov,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Suzhou, China",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/name-variant-enfa-fane/2025.findings-emnlp.624/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2025.findings-emnlp.624",
    pages = "11633--11648",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-335-7",
    abstract = "Retrieving entity knowledge that aligns with user intent is essential for task-oriented dialogue (TOD) systems to support personalization and localization, especially under large-scale knowledge bases. However, generative models tend to suffer from implicit association preference, while retrieval-generation approaches face knowledge transfer discrepancies. To address these challenges, we propose CaTER, a Context-aware Topology Entity Retrieval Contrastive Learning Framework. CaTER introduces a cycle context-aware distilling attention mechanism, which employs context-independent sparse pooling to suppress noise from weakly relevant attributes. We further construct topologically hard negative samples by decoupling entity information from generated responses and design a topology entity retrieval contrastive loss to train the retriever by reverse distillation. Extensive experiments on three standard TOD benchmarks with both small and large-scale knowledge bases show that CaTER consistently outperforms strong baselines such as MAKER and MK-TOD, achieving state-of-the-art performance in TOD system."
}