Multi2WOZ: A Robust Multilingual Dataset and Conversational Pretraining for Task-Oriented Dialog

Chia-Chien Hung, Anne Lauscher, Ivan Vulić, Simone Ponzetto, Goran Glavaš


Abstract
Research on (multi-domain) task-oriented dialog (TOD) has predominantly focused on the English language, primarily due to the shortage of robust TOD datasets in other languages, preventing the systematic investigation of cross-lingual transfer for this crucial NLP application area. In this work, we introduce Multi2WOZ, a new multilingual multi-domain TOD dataset, derived from the well-established English dataset MultiWOZ, that spans four typologically diverse languages: Chinese, German, Arabic, and Russian. In contrast to concurrent efforts, Multi2WOZ contains gold-standard dialogs in target languages that are directly comparable with development and test portions of the English dataset, enabling reliable and comparative estimates of cross-lingual transfer performance for TOD. We then introduce a new framework for multilingual conversational specialization of pretrained language models (PrLMs) that aims to facilitate cross-lingual transfer for arbitrary downstream TOD tasks. Using such conversational PrLMs specialized for concrete target languages, we systematically benchmark a number of zero-shot and few-shot cross-lingual transfer approaches on two standard TOD tasks: Dialog State Tracking and Response Retrieval. Our experiments show that, in most setups, the best performance entails the combination of (i) conversational specialization in the target language and (ii) few-shot transfer for the concrete TOD task. Most importantly, we show that our conversational specialization in the target language allows for an exceptionally sample-efficient few-shot transfer for downstream TOD tasks.
Anthology ID:
2022.naacl-main.270
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:
3687–3703
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.naacl-main.270
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.naacl-main.270
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Chia-Chien Hung, Anne Lauscher, Ivan Vulić, Simone Ponzetto, and Goran Glavaš. 2022. Multi2WOZ: A Robust Multilingual Dataset and Conversational Pretraining for Task-Oriented Dialog. In Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, pages 3687–3703, Seattle, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Multi2WOZ: A Robust Multilingual Dataset and Conversational Pretraining for Task-Oriented Dialog (Hung et al., NAACL 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.naacl-main.270.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2022.naacl-main.270.mp4
Code
 umanlp/multi2woz
Data
CCNetMultiWOZOpenSubtitles