Slot Attention with Value Normalization for Multi-Domain Dialogue State Tracking

Yexiang Wang, Yi Guo, Siqi Zhu


Abstract
Incompleteness of domain ontology and unavailability of some values are two inevitable problems of dialogue state tracking (DST). Existing approaches generally fall into two extremes: choosing models without ontology or embedding ontology in models leading to over-dependence. In this paper, we propose a new architecture to cleverly exploit ontology, which consists of Slot Attention (SA) and Value Normalization (VN), referred to as SAVN. Moreover, we supplement the annotation of supporting span for MultiWOZ 2.1, which is the shortest span in utterances to support the labeled value. SA shares knowledge between slots and utterances and only needs a simple structure to predict the supporting span. VN is designed specifically for the use of ontology, which can convert supporting spans to the values. Empirical results demonstrate that SAVN achieves the state-of-the-art joint accuracy of 54.52% on MultiWOZ 2.0 and 54.86% on MultiWOZ 2.1. Besides, we evaluate VN with incomplete ontology. The results show that even if only 30% ontology is used, VN can also contribute to our model.
Anthology ID:
2020.emnlp-main.243
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)
Month:
November
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3019–3028
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.243
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.emnlp-main.243
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yexiang Wang, Yi Guo, and Siqi Zhu. 2020. Slot Attention with Value Normalization for Multi-Domain Dialogue State Tracking. In Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), pages 3019–3028, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Slot Attention with Value Normalization for Multi-Domain Dialogue State Tracking (Wang et al., EMNLP 2020)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/update-css-js/2020.emnlp-main.243.pdf
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