Chitchat as Interference: Adding User Backstories to Task-Oriented Dialogues

Armand Stricker, Patrick Paroubek


Abstract
During task-oriented dialogues (TODs), human users naturally introduce chitchat that is beyond the immediate scope of the task, interfering with the flow of the conversation. To address this issue without the need for expensive manual data creation, we use few-shot prompting with Llama-2-70B to enhance the MultiWOZ dataset with user backstories, a typical example of chitchat interference in TODs. We assess the impact of this addition by testing two models: one trained solely on TODs and another trained on TODs with a preliminary chitchat interaction. Our analysis demonstrates that our enhanced dataset poses a challenge for these systems. Moreover, we demonstrate that our dataset can be effectively used for training purposes, enabling a system to consistently acknowledge the user’s backstory while also successfully moving the task forward in the same turn, as confirmed by human evaluation. These findings highlight the benefits of generating novel chitchat-TOD scenarios to test TOD systems more thoroughly and improve their resilience to natural user interferences.
Anthology ID:
2024.lrec-main.284
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
Month:
May
Year:
2024
Address:
Torino, Italia
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue
Venues:
LREC | COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA and ICCL
Note:
Pages:
3203–3214
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.284
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Armand Stricker and Patrick Paroubek. 2024. Chitchat as Interference: Adding User Backstories to Task-Oriented Dialogues. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 3203–3214, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
Chitchat as Interference: Adding User Backstories to Task-Oriented Dialogues (Stricker & Paroubek, LREC-COLING 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.284.pdf