Leveraging Slot Descriptions for Zero-Shot Cross-Domain Dialogue StateTracking

Zhaojiang Lin, Bing Liu, Seungwhan Moon, Paul Crook, Zhenpeng Zhou, Zhiguang Wang, Zhou Yu, Andrea Madotto, Eunjoon Cho, Rajen Subba


Abstract
Zero-shot cross-domain dialogue state tracking (DST) enables us to handle unseen domains without the expense of collecting in-domain data. In this paper, we propose a slot descriptions enhanced generative approach for zero-shot cross-domain DST. Specifically, our model first encodes a dialogue context and a slot with a pre-trained self-attentive encoder, and generates slot value in auto-regressive manner. In addition, we incorporate Slot Type Informed Descriptions that capture the shared information of different slots to facilitates the cross-domain knowledge transfer. Experimental results on MultiWOZ shows that our model significantly improve existing state-of-the-art results in zero-shot cross-domain setting.
Anthology ID:
2021.naacl-main.448
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies
Month:
June
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Kristina Toutanova, Anna Rumshisky, Luke Zettlemoyer, Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Iz Beltagy, Steven Bethard, Ryan Cotterell, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Yichao Zhou
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
5640–5648
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.naacl-main.448
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.naacl-main.448
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zhaojiang Lin, Bing Liu, Seungwhan Moon, Paul Crook, Zhenpeng Zhou, Zhiguang Wang, Zhou Yu, Andrea Madotto, Eunjoon Cho, and Rajen Subba. 2021. Leveraging Slot Descriptions for Zero-Shot Cross-Domain Dialogue StateTracking. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, pages 5640–5648, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Leveraging Slot Descriptions for Zero-Shot Cross-Domain Dialogue StateTracking (Lin et al., NAACL 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.naacl-main.448.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.naacl-main.448.mp4
Code
 facebookresearch/Zero-Shot-DST