Robustness Testing of Language Understanding in Task-Oriented Dialog

Jiexi Liu, Ryuichi Takanobu, Jiaxin Wen, Dazhen Wan, Hongguang Li, Weiran Nie, Cheng Li, Wei Peng, Minlie Huang


Abstract
Most language understanding models in task-oriented dialog systems are trained on a small amount of annotated training data, and evaluated in a small set from the same distribution. However, these models can lead to system failure or undesirable output when being exposed to natural language perturbation or variation in practice. In this paper, we conduct comprehensive evaluation and analysis with respect to the robustness of natural language understanding models, and introduce three important aspects related to language understanding in real-world dialog systems, namely, language variety, speech characteristics, and noise perturbation. We propose a model-agnostic toolkit LAUG to approximate natural language perturbations for testing the robustness issues in task-oriented dialog. Four data augmentation approaches covering the three aspects are assembled in LAUG, which reveals critical robustness issues in state-of-the-art models. The augmented dataset through LAUG can be used to facilitate future research on the robustness testing of language understanding in task-oriented dialog.
Anthology ID:
2021.acl-long.192
Volume:
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
August
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Chengqing Zong, Fei Xia, Wenjie Li, Roberto Navigli
Venues:
ACL | IJCNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2467–2480
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.192
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.acl-long.192
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jiexi Liu, Ryuichi Takanobu, Jiaxin Wen, Dazhen Wan, Hongguang Li, Weiran Nie, Cheng Li, Wei Peng, and Minlie Huang. 2021. Robustness Testing of Language Understanding in Task-Oriented Dialog. In Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 2467–2480, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Robustness Testing of Language Understanding in Task-Oriented Dialog (Liu et al., ACL-IJCNLP 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.192.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.192.mp4
Code
 thu-coai/ConvLab-2 +  additional community code