Large Language Models as Zero-shot Dialogue State Tracker through Function Calling

Zekun Li, Zhiyu Chen, Mike Ross, Patrick Huber, Seungwhan Moon, Zhaojiang Lin, Xin Dong, Adithya Sagar, Xifeng Yan, Paul Crook


Abstract
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly prevalent in conversational systems due to their advanced understanding and generative capabilities in general contexts. However, their effectiveness in task-oriented dialogues (TOD), which requires not only response generation but also effective dialogue state tracking (DST) within specific tasks and domains, remains less satisfying. In this work, we propose a novel approach FnCTOD for solving DST with LLMs through function calling. This method improves zero-shot DST, allowing adaptation to diverse domains without extensive data collection or model tuning. Our experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves exceptional performance with both modestly sized open-source and also proprietary LLMs: with in-context prompting it enables various 7B or 13B parameter models to surpass the previous state-of-the-art (SOTA) achieved by ChatGPT, and improves ChatGPT’s performance beating the SOTA by 5.6% average joint goal accuracy (JGA). Individual model results for GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 are boosted by 4.8% and 14%, respectively. We also show that by fine-tuning on a small collection of diverse task-oriented dialogues, we can equip modestly sized models, specifically a 13B parameter LLaMA2-Chat model, with function-calling capabilities and DST performance comparable to ChatGPT while maintaining their chat capabilities. We have made the code publicly available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/FnCTOD.
Anthology ID:
2024.acl-long.471
Volume:
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
8688–8704
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.471
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.acl-long.471
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zekun Li, Zhiyu Chen, Mike Ross, Patrick Huber, Seungwhan Moon, Zhaojiang Lin, Xin Dong, Adithya Sagar, Xifeng Yan, and Paul Crook. 2024. Large Language Models as Zero-shot Dialogue State Tracker through Function Calling. In Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 8688–8704, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Large Language Models as Zero-shot Dialogue State Tracker through Function Calling (Li et al., ACL 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.471.pdf