ConvLab-3: A Flexible Dialogue System Toolkit Based on a Unified Data Format

Qi Zhu, Christian Geishauser, Hsien-chin Lin, Carel van Niekerk, Baolin Peng, Zheng Zhang, Shutong Feng, Michael Heck, Nurul Lubis, Dazhen Wan, Xiaochen Zhu, Jianfeng Gao, Milica Gasic, Minlie Huang


Abstract
Task-oriented dialogue (TOD) systems function as digital assistants, guiding users through various tasks such as booking flights or finding restaurants. Existing toolkits for building TOD systems often fall short in delivering comprehensive arrays of data, model, and experimental environments with a user-friendly experience. We introduce ConvLab-3: a multifaceted dialogue system toolkit crafted to bridge this gap. Our unified data format simplifies the integration of diverse datasets and models, significantly reducing complexity and cost for studying generalization and transfer. Enhanced with robust reinforcement learning (RL) tools, featuring a streamlined training process, in-depth evaluation tools, and a selection of user simulators, ConvLab-3 supports the rapid development and evaluation of robust dialogue policies. Through an extensive study, we demonstrate the efficacy of transfer learning and RL and showcase that ConvLab-3 is not only a powerful tool for seasoned researchers but also an accessible platform for newcomers.
Anthology ID:
2023.emnlp-demo.9
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Yansong Feng, Els Lefever
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
106–123
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-demo.9
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-demo.9
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Qi Zhu, Christian Geishauser, Hsien-chin Lin, Carel van Niekerk, Baolin Peng, Zheng Zhang, Shutong Feng, Michael Heck, Nurul Lubis, Dazhen Wan, Xiaochen Zhu, Jianfeng Gao, Milica Gasic, and Minlie Huang. 2023. ConvLab-3: A Flexible Dialogue System Toolkit Based on a Unified Data Format. In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations, pages 106–123, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
ConvLab-3: A Flexible Dialogue System Toolkit Based on a Unified Data Format (Zhu et al., EMNLP 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-demo.9.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-demo.9.mp4