Attention-based pre-trained language models such as GPT-2 brought considerable progress to end-to-end dialogue modelling. However, they also present considerable risks for task-oriented dialogue, such as lack of knowledge grounding or diversity. To address these issues, we introduce modified training objectives for language model finetuning, and we employ massive data augmentation via back-translation to increase the diversity of the training data. We further examine the possibilities of combining data from multiples sources to improve performance on the target dataset. We carefully evaluate our contributions with both human and automatic methods. Our model substantially outperforms the baseline on the MultiWOZ data and shows competitive performance with state of the art in both automatic and human evaluation.

Définition et détection des incohérences du système dans les dialogues orientés tâche. Nous présentons des expériences sur la détection automatique des comportements incohérents des systèmes de dialogues orientés tâche à partir du contexte. Nous enrichissons les données bAbI/DSTC2 (Bordes et al., 2017) avec une annotation automatique des incohérences de dialogue, et nous démontrons que les incohérences sont en corrélation avec les dialogues ratés. Nous supposons que l’utilisation d’un historique de dialogue limité et la prédiction du prochain tour de l’utilisateur peuvent améliorer la classification des incohérences. Si les deux hypothèses sont confirmées pour un modèle de dialogue basé sur les réseaux de mémoire, elles ne le sont pas pour un entraînement basé sur le modèle de langage GPT-2, qui bénéficie le plus de l’utilisation de l’historique complet du dialogue et obtient un score de précision de 0,99.

Task-oriented dialogue systems typically require manual annotation of dialogue slots in training data, which is costly to obtain. We propose a method that eliminates this requirement: We use weak supervision from existing linguistic annotation models to identify potential slot candidates, then automatically identify domain-relevant slots by using clustering algorithms. Furthermore, we use the resulting slot annotation to train a neural-network-based tagger that is able to perform slot tagging with no human intervention. This tagger is trained solely on the outputs of our method and thus does not rely on any labeled data. Our model demonstrates state-of-the-art performance in slot tagging without labeled training data on four different dialogue domains. Moreover, we find that slot annotations discovered by our model significantly improve the performance of an end-to-end dialogue response generation model, compared to using no slot annotation at all.