Towards LLM-driven Dialogue State Tracking

Yujie Feng, Zexin Lu, Bo Liu, Liming Zhan, Xiao-Ming Wu


Abstract
Dialogue State Tracking (DST) is of paramount importance in ensuring accurate tracking of user goals and system actions within task-oriented dialogue systems. The emergence of large language models (LLMs) such as GPT3 and ChatGPT has sparked considerable interest in assessing their efficacy across diverse applications. In this study, we conduct an initial examination of ChatGPT’s capabilities in DST. Our evaluation uncovers the exceptional performance of ChatGPT in this task, offering valuable insights to researchers regarding its capabilities and providing useful directions for designing and enhancing dialogue systems. Despite its impressive performance, ChatGPT has significant limitations including its closed-source nature, request restrictions, raising data privacy concerns, and lacking local deployment capabilities. To address these concerns, we present LDST, an LLM-driven DST framework based on smaller, open-source foundation models. By utilizing a novel domain-slot instruction tuning method, LDST achieves performance on par with ChatGPT. Comprehensive evaluations across three distinct experimental settings, we find that LDST exhibits remarkable performance improvements in both zero-shot and few-shot setting compared to previous SOTA methods. The source code is provided for reproducibility.
Anthology ID:
2023.emnlp-main.48
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:
739–755
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.48
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.48
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yujie Feng, Zexin Lu, Bo Liu, Liming Zhan, and Xiao-Ming Wu. 2023. Towards LLM-driven Dialogue State Tracking. In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 739–755, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Towards LLM-driven Dialogue State Tracking (Feng et al., EMNLP 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.48.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.48.mp4