InstructDial: Improving Zero and Few-shot Generalization in Dialogue through Instruction Tuning

Prakhar Gupta, Cathy Jiao, Yi-Ting Yeh, Shikib Mehri, Maxine Eskenazi, Jeffrey Bigham


Abstract
Instruction tuning is an emergent paradigm in NLP wherein natural language instructions are leveraged with language models to induce zero-shot performance on unseen tasks. Dialogue is an especially interesting area in which to explore instruction tuning because dialogue systems perform multiple kinds of tasks related to language (e.g., natural language understanding and generation, domain-specific interaction), yet instruction tuning has not been systematically explored for dialogue-related tasks. We introduce InstructDial, an instruction tuning framework for dialogue, which consists of a repository of 48 diverse dialogue tasks in a unified text-to-text format created from 59 openly available dialogue datasets. We explore cross-task generalization ability on models tuned on InstructDial across diverse dialogue tasks. Our analysis reveals that InstructDial enables good zero-shot performance on unseen datasets and tasks such as dialogue evaluation and intent detection, and even better performance in a few-shot setting. To ensure that models adhere to instructions, we introduce novel meta-tasks. We establish benchmark zero-shot and few-shot performance of models trained using the proposed framework on multiple dialogue tasks.
Anthology ID:
2022.emnlp-main.33
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
December
Year:
2022
Address:
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
Editors:
Yoav Goldberg, Zornitsa Kozareva, Yue Zhang
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
505–525
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.emnlp-main.33
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.emnlp-main.33
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Prakhar Gupta, Cathy Jiao, Yi-Ting Yeh, Shikib Mehri, Maxine Eskenazi, and Jeffrey Bigham. 2022. InstructDial: Improving Zero and Few-shot Generalization in Dialogue through Instruction Tuning. In Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 505–525, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
InstructDial: Improving Zero and Few-shot Generalization in Dialogue through Instruction Tuning (Gupta et al., EMNLP 2022)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.emnlp-main.33.pdf