Velocidapter: Task-oriented Dialogue Comprehension Modeling Pairing Synthetic Text Generation with Domain Adaptation

Ibrahim Taha Aksu, Zhengyuan Liu, Min-Yen Kan, Nancy Chen


Abstract
We introduce a synthetic dialogue generation framework, Velocidapter, which addresses the corpus availability problem for dialogue comprehension. Velocidapter augments datasets by simulating synthetic conversations for a task-oriented dialogue domain, requiring a small amount of bootstrapping work for each new domain. We evaluate the efficacy of our framework on a task-oriented dialogue comprehension dataset, MRCWOZ, which we curate by annotating questions for slots in the restaurant, taxi, and hotel domains of the MultiWOZ 2.2 dataset (Zang et al., 2020). We run experiments within a low-resource setting, where we pretrain a model on SQuAD, fine-tuning it on either a small original data or on the synthetic data generated by our framework. Velocidapter shows significant improvements using both the transformer-based BERTBase and BiDAF as base models. We further show that the framework is easy to use by novice users and conclude that Velocidapter can greatly help training over task-oriented dialogues, especially for low-resourced emerging domains.
Anthology ID:
2021.sigdial-1.14
Volume:
Proceedings of the 22nd Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue
Month:
July
Year:
2021
Address:
Singapore and Online
Editors:
Haizhou Li, Gina-Anne Levow, Zhou Yu, Chitralekha Gupta, Berrak Sisman, Siqi Cai, David Vandyke, Nina Dethlefs, Yan Wu, Junyi Jessy Li
Venue:
SIGDIAL
SIG:
SIGDIAL
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
133–143
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.sigdial-1.14
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.sigdial-1.14
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ibrahim Taha Aksu, Zhengyuan Liu, Min-Yen Kan, and Nancy Chen. 2021. Velocidapter: Task-oriented Dialogue Comprehension Modeling Pairing Synthetic Text Generation with Domain Adaptation. In Proceedings of the 22nd Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue, pages 133–143, Singapore and Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Velocidapter: Task-oriented Dialogue Comprehension Modeling Pairing Synthetic Text Generation with Domain Adaptation (Aksu et al., SIGDIAL 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.sigdial-1.14.pdf
Video:
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2BkbrFFGTFA
Code
 cuthalionn/velocidapter
Data
RACETriviaQA