Zero-shot Generalization in Dialog State Tracking through Generative Question Answering

Shuyang Li, Jin Cao, Mukund Sridhar, Henghui Zhu, Shang-Wen Li, Wael Hamza, Julian McAuley

Abstract
Dialog State Tracking (DST), an integral part of modern dialog systems, aims to track user preferences and constraints (slots) in task-oriented dialogs. In real-world settings with constantly changing services, DST systems must generalize to new domains and unseen slot types. Existing methods for DST do not generalize well to new slot names and many require known ontologies of slot types and values for inference. We introduce a novel ontology-free framework that supports natural language queries for unseen constraints and slots in multi-domain task-oriented dialogs. Our approach is based on generative question-answering using a conditional language model pre-trained on substantive English sentences. Our model improves joint goal accuracy in zero-shot domain adaptation settings by up to 9% (absolute) over the previous state-of-the-art on the MultiWOZ 2.1 dataset.
Anthology ID:
2021.eacl-main.91
Volume:
Proceedings of the 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Main Volume
Month:
April
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Venue:
EACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1063–1074
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.eacl-main.91
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.eacl-main.91
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Shuyang Li, Jin Cao, Mukund Sridhar, Henghui Zhu, Shang-Wen Li, Wael Hamza, and Julian McAuley. 2021. Zero-shot Generalization in Dialog State Tracking through Generative Question Answering. In Proceedings of the 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Main Volume, pages 1063–1074, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Zero-shot Generalization in Dialog State Tracking through Generative Question Answering (Li et al., EACL 2021)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/starsem-semeval-split/2021.eacl-main.91.pdf
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