Zero-Shot Generalizable End-to-End Task-Oriented Dialog System using Context Summarization and Domain Schema

Task-oriented dialog systems empower users to accom- plish their goals by facilitating intuitive and expres- sive natural language interactions. State-of-the-art ap- proaches in task-oriented dialog systems formulate the problem as a conditional sequence generation task and fine-tune pre-trained cau...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Adib Mosharrof, M.H. Maqbool, A.B. Siddique
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: LibraryPress@UF 2023-05-01
Series:Proceedings of the International Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Society Conference
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Online Access:https://journals.flvc.org/FLAIRS/article/view/133072
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Summary:Task-oriented dialog systems empower users to accom- plish their goals by facilitating intuitive and expres- sive natural language interactions. State-of-the-art ap- proaches in task-oriented dialog systems formulate the problem as a conditional sequence generation task and fine-tune pre-trained causal language models in the su- pervised setting. This requires labeled training data for each new domain or task, and acquiring such data is prohibitively laborious and expensive, thus making it a bottleneck for scaling systems to a wide range of domains. To overcome this challenge, we intro- duce a novel Zero-Shot generalizable end-to-end Task- oriented Dialog system, ZS-ToD, that leverages domain schemas to allow for robust generalization to unseen do- mains and exploits effective summarization of the dia- log history. We employ GPT-2 as a backbone model and introduce a two-step training process where the goal of the first step is to learn the general structure of the dialog data and the second step optimizes the response gen- eration as well as intermediate outputs, such as dialog state and system actions. As opposed to state-of-the-art systems that are trained to fulfill certain intents in the given domains and memorize task-specific conversa- tional patterns, ZS-ToD learns generic task-completion skills by comprehending domain semantics via domain schemas and generalizing to unseen domains seam- lessly. We conduct an extensive experimental evaluation on SGD and SGD-X datasets that span up to 20 unique domains and ZS-ToD outperforms state-of-the-art sys- tems on key metrics, with an improvement of +17% on joint goal accuracy and +5 on inform. Additionally, we present a detailed ablation study to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed components and training mechanism.
ISSN:2334-0754
2334-0762