Dialogue Ontology Relation Extraction via Constrained Chain-of-Thought Decoding

Renato Vukovic, David Arps, Carel van Niekerk, Benjamin Matthias Ruppik, Hsien-chin Lin, Michael Heck, Milica Gasic


Abstract
State-of-the-art task-oriented dialogue systems typically rely on task-specific ontologies for fulfilling user queries. The majority of task-oriented dialogue data, such as customer service recordings, comes without ontology and annotation. Such ontologies are normally built manually, limiting the application of specialised systems. Dialogue ontology construction is an approach for automating that process and typically consists of two steps: term extraction and relation extraction. In this work, we focus on relation extraction in a transfer learning set-up. To improve the generalisation, we propose an extension to the decoding mechanism of large language models. We adapt Chain-of-Thought (CoT) decoding, recently developed for reasoning problems, to generative relation extraction. Here, we generate multiple branches in the decoding space and select the relations based on a confidence threshold. By constraining the decoding to ontology terms and relations, we aim to decrease the risk of hallucination. We conduct extensive experimentation on two widely used datasets and find improvements in performance on target ontology for source fine-tuned and one-shot prompted large language models.
Anthology ID:
2024.sigdial-1.33
Volume:
Proceedings of the 25th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue
Month:
September
Year:
2024
Address:
Kyoto, Japan
Editors:
Tatsuya Kawahara, Vera Demberg, Stefan Ultes, Koji Inoue, Shikib Mehri, David Howcroft, Kazunori Komatani
Venue:
SIGDIAL
SIG:
SIGDIAL
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
370–384
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.sigdial-1.33
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Renato Vukovic, David Arps, Carel van Niekerk, Benjamin Matthias Ruppik, Hsien-chin Lin, Michael Heck, and Milica Gasic. 2024. Dialogue Ontology Relation Extraction via Constrained Chain-of-Thought Decoding. In Proceedings of the 25th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue, pages 370–384, Kyoto, Japan. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Dialogue Ontology Relation Extraction via Constrained Chain-of-Thought Decoding (Vukovic et al., SIGDIAL 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.sigdial-1.33.pdf