Comparing Data Augmentation Methods for End-to-End Task-Oriented Dialog Systems

Christos Vlachos, Themos Stafylakis, Ion Androutsopoulos


Abstract
Creating effective and reliable task-oriented dialog systems (ToDSs) is challenging, not only because of the complex structure of these systems, but also due to the scarcity of training data, especially when several modules need to be trained separately, each one with its own input/output training examples. Data augmentation (DA), whereby synthetic training examples are added to the training data, has been successful in other NLP systems, but has not been explored as extensively in ToDSs. We empirically evaluate the effectiveness of DA methods in an end-to-end ToDS setting, where a single system is trained to handle all processing stages, from user inputs to system outputs. We experiment with two ToDSs (UBAR, GALAXY) on two datasets (MultiWOZ, KVRET). We consider three types of DA methods (word-level, sentence-level, dialog-level), comparing eight DA methods that have shown promising results in ToDSs and other NLP systems. We show that all DA methods considered are beneficial, and we highlight the best ones, also providing advice to practitioners. We also introduce a more challenging few-shot cross-domain ToDS setting, reaching similar conclusions.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-acl.431
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
7216–7240
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.431
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.findings-acl.431
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Christos Vlachos, Themos Stafylakis, and Ion Androutsopoulos. 2024. Comparing Data Augmentation Methods for End-to-End Task-Oriented Dialog Systems. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024, pages 7216–7240, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Comparing Data Augmentation Methods for End-to-End Task-Oriented Dialog Systems (Vlachos et al., Findings 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.431.pdf