UniDS: A Unified Dialogue System for Chit-Chat and Task-oriented Dialogues

Xinyan Zhao, Bin He, Yasheng Wang, Yitong Li, Fei Mi, Yajiao Liu, Xin Jiang, Qun Liu, Huanhuan Chen


Abstract
With the advances in deep learning, tremendous progress has been made with chit-chat dialogue systems and task-oriented dialogue systems. However, these two systems are often tackled separately in current methods. To achieve more natural interaction with humans, dialogue systems need to be capable of both chatting and accomplishing tasks. To this end, we propose a unified dialogue system (UniDS) with the two aforementioned skills. In particular, we design a unified dialogue data schema, compatible for both chit-chat and task-oriented dialogues. Besides, we propose a two-stage training method to train UniDS based on the unified dialogue data schema. UniDS does not need to adding extra parameters to existing chit-chat dialogue systems. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed UniDS works comparably well as the state-of-the-art chit-chat dialogue systems and task-oriented dialogue systems. More importantly, UniDS achieves better robustness than pure dialogue systems and satisfactory switch ability between two types of dialogues.
Anthology ID:
2022.dialdoc-1.2
Volume:
Proceedings of the Second DialDoc Workshop on Document-grounded Dialogue and Conversational Question Answering
Month:
May
Year:
2022
Address:
Dublin, Ireland
Editors:
Song Feng, Hui Wan, Caixia Yuan, Han Yu
Venue:
dialdoc
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
13–22
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.dialdoc-1.2
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.dialdoc-1.2
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Xinyan Zhao, Bin He, Yasheng Wang, Yitong Li, Fei Mi, Yajiao Liu, Xin Jiang, Qun Liu, and Huanhuan Chen. 2022. UniDS: A Unified Dialogue System for Chit-Chat and Task-oriented Dialogues. In Proceedings of the Second DialDoc Workshop on Document-grounded Dialogue and Conversational Question Answering, pages 13–22, Dublin, Ireland. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
UniDS: A Unified Dialogue System for Chit-Chat and Task-oriented Dialogues (Zhao et al., dialdoc 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.dialdoc-1.2.pdf