Comet: Dialog Context Fusion Mechanism for End-to-End Task-Oriented Dialog with Multi-task Learning

Haipeng Sun, Junwei Bao, Youzheng Wu, Xiaodong He


Abstract
Existing end-to-end task-oriented dialog systems often encounter challenges arising from implicit information, coreference, and the presence of noisy and irrelevant data within the dialog context. These issues hinder the system’s ability to fully comprehend critical information and lead to inaccurate responses. To address these concerns, we propose Comet, a dialog context fusion mechanism for end-to-end task-oriented dialog, augmented with three supplementary tasks: dialog summarization, domain prediction, and slot detection. Dialog summarization facilitates a more comprehensive understanding of important dialog context information by Comet. Domain prediction enables Comet to concentrate on domain-specific information, thus reducing interference from irrelevant information. Slot detection empowers Comet to accurately identify and comprehend essential dialog context information. Additionally, we introduce a data refinement strategy to enhance the comprehensiveness and recommendability of the generated responses. Experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of our proposed methods compared to existing end-to-end task-oriented dialog systems, achieving state-of-the-art results on the MultiWOZ and CrossWOZ datasets.
Anthology ID:
2025.coling-main.702
Volume:
Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
January
Year:
2025
Address:
Abu Dhabi, UAE
Editors:
Owen Rambow, Leo Wanner, Marianna Apidianaki, Hend Al-Khalifa, Barbara Di Eugenio, Steven Schockaert
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
10541–10553
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.702/
DOI:
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Cite (ACL):
Haipeng Sun, Junwei Bao, Youzheng Wu, and Xiaodong He. 2025. Comet: Dialog Context Fusion Mechanism for End-to-End Task-Oriented Dialog with Multi-task Learning. In Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 10541–10553, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Comet: Dialog Context Fusion Mechanism for End-to-End Task-Oriented Dialog with Multi-task Learning (Sun et al., COLING 2025)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.702.pdf