Hierarchical Inductive Transfer for Continual Dialogue Learning

Shaoxiong Feng, Xuancheng Ren, Kan Li, Xu Sun


Abstract
Pre-trained models have achieved excellent performance on the dialogue task. However, for the continual increase of online chit-chat scenarios, directly fine-tuning these models for each of the new tasks not only explodes the capacity of the dialogue system on the embedded devices but also causes knowledge forgetting on pre-trained models and knowledge interference among diverse dialogue tasks. In this work, we propose a hierarchical inductive transfer framework to learn and deploy the dialogue skills continually and efficiently. First, we introduce the adapter module into pre-trained models for learning new dialogue tasks. As the only trainable module, it is beneficial for the dialogue system on the embedded devices to acquire new dialogue skills with negligible additional parameters. Then, for alleviating knowledge interference between tasks yet benefiting the regularization between them, we further design hierarchical inductive transfer that enables new tasks to use general knowledge in the base adapter without being misled by diverse knowledge in task-specific adapters. Empirical evaluation and analysis indicate that our framework obtains comparable performance under deployment-friendly model capacity.
Anthology ID:
2022.findings-acl.57
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2022
Month:
May
Year:
2022
Address:
Dublin, Ireland
Editors:
Smaranda Muresan, Preslav Nakov, Aline Villavicencio
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
693–699
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.findings-acl.57
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.findings-acl.57
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Shaoxiong Feng, Xuancheng Ren, Kan Li, and Xu Sun. 2022. Hierarchical Inductive Transfer for Continual Dialogue Learning. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2022, pages 693–699, Dublin, Ireland. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Hierarchical Inductive Transfer for Continual Dialogue Learning (Feng et al., Findings 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.findings-acl.57.pdf