@inproceedings{lin-etal-2020-mintl,
title = "{M}in{TL}: Minimalist Transfer Learning for Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems",
author = "Lin, Zhaojiang and
Madotto, Andrea and
Winata, Genta Indra and
Fung, Pascale",
editor = "Webber, Bonnie and
Cohn, Trevor and
He, Yulan and
Liu, Yang",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)",
month = nov,
year = "2020",
address = "Online",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.273",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2020.emnlp-main.273",
pages = "3391--3405",
abstract = "In this paper, we propose Minimalist Transfer Learning (MinTL) to simplify the system design process of task-oriented dialogue systems and alleviate the over-dependency on annotated data. MinTL is a simple yet effective transfer learning framework, which allows us to plug-and-play pre-trained seq2seq models, and jointly learn dialogue state tracking and dialogue response generation. Unlike previous approaches, which use a copy mechanism to {``}carryover{''} the old dialogue states to the new one, we introduce Levenshtein belief spans (Lev), that allows efficient dialogue state tracking with a minimal generation length. We instantiate our learning framework with two pre-trained backbones: T5 and BART, and evaluate them on MultiWOZ. Extensive experiments demonstrate that: 1) our systems establish new state-of-the-art results on end-to-end response generation, 2) MinTL-based systems are more robust than baseline methods in the low resource setting, and they achieve competitive results with only 20{\%} training data, and 3) Lev greatly improves the inference efficiency.",
}
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<modsCollection xmlns="http://www.loc.gov/mods/v3">
<mods ID="lin-etal-2020-mintl">
<titleInfo>
<title>MinTL: Minimalist Transfer Learning for Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems</title>
</titleInfo>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Zhaojiang</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Lin</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Andrea</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Madotto</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Genta</namePart>
<namePart type="given">Indra</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Winata</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Pascale</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Fung</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<originInfo>
<dateIssued>2020-11</dateIssued>
</originInfo>
<typeOfResource>text</typeOfResource>
<relatedItem type="host">
<titleInfo>
<title>Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)</title>
</titleInfo>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Bonnie</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Webber</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Trevor</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Cohn</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Yulan</namePart>
<namePart type="family">He</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Yang</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Liu</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<originInfo>
<publisher>Association for Computational Linguistics</publisher>
<place>
<placeTerm type="text">Online</placeTerm>
</place>
</originInfo>
<genre authority="marcgt">conference publication</genre>
</relatedItem>
<abstract>In this paper, we propose Minimalist Transfer Learning (MinTL) to simplify the system design process of task-oriented dialogue systems and alleviate the over-dependency on annotated data. MinTL is a simple yet effective transfer learning framework, which allows us to plug-and-play pre-trained seq2seq models, and jointly learn dialogue state tracking and dialogue response generation. Unlike previous approaches, which use a copy mechanism to “carryover” the old dialogue states to the new one, we introduce Levenshtein belief spans (Lev), that allows efficient dialogue state tracking with a minimal generation length. We instantiate our learning framework with two pre-trained backbones: T5 and BART, and evaluate them on MultiWOZ. Extensive experiments demonstrate that: 1) our systems establish new state-of-the-art results on end-to-end response generation, 2) MinTL-based systems are more robust than baseline methods in the low resource setting, and they achieve competitive results with only 20% training data, and 3) Lev greatly improves the inference efficiency.</abstract>
<identifier type="citekey">lin-etal-2020-mintl</identifier>
<identifier type="doi">10.18653/v1/2020.emnlp-main.273</identifier>
<location>
<url>https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.273</url>
</location>
<part>
<date>2020-11</date>
<extent unit="page">
<start>3391</start>
<end>3405</end>
</extent>
</part>
</mods>
</modsCollection>
%0 Conference Proceedings
%T MinTL: Minimalist Transfer Learning for Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems
%A Lin, Zhaojiang
%A Madotto, Andrea
%A Winata, Genta Indra
%A Fung, Pascale
%Y Webber, Bonnie
%Y Cohn, Trevor
%Y He, Yulan
%Y Liu, Yang
%S Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)
%D 2020
%8 November
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Online
%F lin-etal-2020-mintl
%X In this paper, we propose Minimalist Transfer Learning (MinTL) to simplify the system design process of task-oriented dialogue systems and alleviate the over-dependency on annotated data. MinTL is a simple yet effective transfer learning framework, which allows us to plug-and-play pre-trained seq2seq models, and jointly learn dialogue state tracking and dialogue response generation. Unlike previous approaches, which use a copy mechanism to “carryover” the old dialogue states to the new one, we introduce Levenshtein belief spans (Lev), that allows efficient dialogue state tracking with a minimal generation length. We instantiate our learning framework with two pre-trained backbones: T5 and BART, and evaluate them on MultiWOZ. Extensive experiments demonstrate that: 1) our systems establish new state-of-the-art results on end-to-end response generation, 2) MinTL-based systems are more robust than baseline methods in the low resource setting, and they achieve competitive results with only 20% training data, and 3) Lev greatly improves the inference efficiency.
%R 10.18653/v1/2020.emnlp-main.273
%U https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.273
%U https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2020.emnlp-main.273
%P 3391-3405
Markdown (Informal)
[MinTL: Minimalist Transfer Learning for Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems](https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.273) (Lin et al., EMNLP 2020)
ACL