End-to-end Task-oriented Dialogue: A Survey of Tasks, Methods, and Future Directions

Libo Qin, Wenbo Pan, Qiguang Chen, Lizi Liao, Zhou Yu, Yue Zhang, Wanxiang Che, Min Li


Abstract
End-to-end task-oriented dialogue (EToD) can directly generate responses in an end-to-end fashion without modular training, which attracts escalating popularity. The advancement of deep neural networks, especially the successful use of large pre-trained models, has further led to significant progress in EToD research in recent years. In this paper, we present a thorough review and provide a unified perspective to summarize existing approaches as well as recent trends to advance the development of EToD research. The contributions of this paper can be summarized: (1) First survey: to our knowledge, we take the first step to present a thorough survey of this research field; (2) New taxonomy: we first introduce a unified perspective for EToD, including (i) Modularly EToD and (ii) Fully EToD; (3) New Frontiers: we discuss some potential frontier areas as well as the corresponding challenges, hoping to spur breakthrough research in EToD field; (4) Abundant resources: we build a public website, where EToD researchers could directly access the recent progress. We hope this work can serve as a thorough reference for the EToD research community.
Anthology ID:
2023.emnlp-main.363
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
5925–5941
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.363
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.363
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Libo Qin, Wenbo Pan, Qiguang Chen, Lizi Liao, Zhou Yu, Yue Zhang, Wanxiang Che, and Min Li. 2023. End-to-end Task-oriented Dialogue: A Survey of Tasks, Methods, and Future Directions. In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 5925–5941, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
End-to-end Task-oriented Dialogue: A Survey of Tasks, Methods, and Future Directions (Qin et al., EMNLP 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.363.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.363.mp4