Diverse and Effective Synthetic Data Generation for Adaptable Zero-Shot Dialogue State Tracking

James D. Finch, Jinho D. Choi


Abstract
We demonstrate substantial performance gains in zero-shot dialogue state tracking (DST) by enhancing training data diversity through synthetic data generation.Existing DST datasets are severely limited in the number of application domains and slot types they cover due to the high costs of data collection, restricting their adaptability to new domains.This work addresses this challenge with a novel, fully automatic data generation approach that creates synthetic zero-shot DST datasets.Distinguished from previous methods, our approach can generate dialogues across a massive range of application domains, complete with silver-standard dialogue state annotations and slot descriptions.This technique is used to create the D0T dataset for training zero-shot DST models, encompassing an unprecedented 1,000+ domains. Experiments on the MultiWOZ benchmark show that training models on diverse synthetic data improves Joint Goal Accuracy by 6.7%, achieving results competitive with models 13.5 times larger than ours.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-emnlp.731
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
12527–12544
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-emnlp.731/
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.findings-emnlp.731
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
James D. Finch and Jinho D. Choi. 2024. Diverse and Effective Synthetic Data Generation for Adaptable Zero-Shot Dialogue State Tracking. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024, pages 12527–12544, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Diverse and Effective Synthetic Data Generation for Adaptable Zero-Shot Dialogue State Tracking (Finch & Choi, Findings 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-emnlp.731.pdf