Beyond Domain APIs: Task-oriented Conversational Modeling with Unstructured Knowledge Access

Seokhwan Kim, Mihail Eric, Karthik Gopalakrishnan, Behnam Hedayatnia, Yang Liu, Dilek Hakkani-Tur


Abstract
Most prior work on task-oriented dialogue systems are restricted to a limited coverage of domain APIs, while users oftentimes have domain related requests that are not covered by the APIs. In this paper, we propose to expand coverage of task-oriented dialogue systems by incorporating external unstructured knowledge sources. We define three sub-tasks: knowledge-seeking turn detection, knowledge selection, and knowledge-grounded response generation, which can be modeled individually or jointly. We introduce an augmented version of MultiWOZ 2.1, which includes new out-of-API-coverage turns and responses grounded on external knowledge sources. We present baselines for each sub-task using both conventional and neural approaches. Our experimental results demonstrate the need for further research in this direction to enable more informative conversational systems.
Anthology ID:
2020.sigdial-1.35
Volume:
Proceedings of the 21th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue
Month:
July
Year:
2020
Address:
1st virtual meeting
Editors:
Olivier Pietquin, Smaranda Muresan, Vivian Chen, Casey Kennington, David Vandyke, Nina Dethlefs, Koji Inoue, Erik Ekstedt, Stefan Ultes
Venue:
SIGDIAL
SIG:
SIGDIAL
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
278–289
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.sigdial-1.35
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.sigdial-1.35
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Seokhwan Kim, Mihail Eric, Karthik Gopalakrishnan, Behnam Hedayatnia, Yang Liu, and Dilek Hakkani-Tur. 2020. Beyond Domain APIs: Task-oriented Conversational Modeling with Unstructured Knowledge Access. In Proceedings of the 21th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue, pages 278–289, 1st virtual meeting. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Beyond Domain APIs: Task-oriented Conversational Modeling with Unstructured Knowledge Access (Kim et al., SIGDIAL 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.sigdial-1.35.pdf
Video:
 https://youtube.com/watch?v=0NwAtEe-vUA
Code
 additional community code