LUNA: Learning Slot-Turn Alignment for Dialogue State Tracking

Yifan Wang, Jing Zhao, Junwei Bao, Chaoqun Duan, Youzheng Wu, Xiaodong He


Abstract
Dialogue state tracking (DST) aims to predict the current dialogue state given the dialogue history. Existing methods generally exploit the utterances of all dialogue turns to assign value for each slot. This could lead to suboptimal results due to the information introduced from irrelevant utterances in the dialogue history, which may be useless and can even cause confusion. To address this problem, we propose LUNA, a SLot-TUrN Alignment enhanced approach. It first explicitly aligns each slot with its most relevant utterance, then further predicts the corresponding value based on this aligned utterance instead of all dialogue utterances. Furthermore, we design a slot ranking auxiliary task to learn the temporal correlation among slots which could facilitate the alignment. Comprehensive experiments are conducted on three multi-domain task-oriented dialogue datasets, MultiWOZ 2.0, MultiWOZ 2.1, and MultiWOZ 2.2. The results show that LUNA achieves new state-of-the-art results on these datasets.
Anthology ID:
2022.naacl-main.242
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies
Month:
July
Year:
2022
Address:
Seattle, United States
Editors:
Marine Carpuat, Marie-Catherine de Marneffe, Ivan Vladimir Meza Ruiz
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3319–3328
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.naacl-main.242
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.naacl-main.242
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yifan Wang, Jing Zhao, Junwei Bao, Chaoqun Duan, Youzheng Wu, and Xiaodong He. 2022. LUNA: Learning Slot-Turn Alignment for Dialogue State Tracking. In Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, pages 3319–3328, Seattle, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
LUNA: Learning Slot-Turn Alignment for Dialogue State Tracking (Wang et al., NAACL 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.naacl-main.242.pdf
Software:
 2022.naacl-main.242.software.tgz
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2022.naacl-main.242.mp4
Code
 nlper27149/luna-dst
Data
MultiWOZ