Hello, It’s GPT-2 - How Can I Help You? Towards the Use of Pretrained Language Models for Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems

Paweł Budzianowski, Ivan Vulić


Abstract
Data scarcity is a long-standing and crucial challenge that hinders quick development of task-oriented dialogue systems across multiple domains: task-oriented dialogue models are expected to learn grammar, syntax, dialogue reasoning, decision making, and language generation from absurdly small amounts of task-specific data. In this paper, we demonstrate that recent progress in language modeling pre-training and transfer learning shows promise to overcome this problem. We propose a task-oriented dialogue model that operates solely on text input: it effectively bypasses explicit policy and language generation modules. Building on top of the TransferTransfo framework (Wolf et al., 2019) and generative model pre-training (Radford et al., 2019), we validate the approach on complex multi-domain task-oriented dialogues from the MultiWOZ dataset. Our automatic and human evaluations show that the proposed model is on par with a strong task-specific neural baseline. In the long run, our approach holds promise to mitigate the data scarcity problem, and to support the construction of more engaging and more eloquent task-oriented conversational agents.
Anthology ID:
D19-5602
Volume:
Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Neural Generation and Translation
Month:
November
Year:
2019
Address:
Hong Kong
Editors:
Alexandra Birch, Andrew Finch, Hiroaki Hayashi, Ioannis Konstas, Thang Luong, Graham Neubig, Yusuke Oda, Katsuhito Sudoh
Venue:
NGT
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
15–22
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-5602
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D19-5602
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Paweł Budzianowski and Ivan Vulić. 2019. Hello, It’s GPT-2 - How Can I Help You? Towards the Use of Pretrained Language Models for Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems. In Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Neural Generation and Translation, pages 15–22, Hong Kong. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Hello, It’s GPT-2 - How Can I Help You? Towards the Use of Pretrained Language Models for Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems (Budzianowski & Vulić, NGT 2019)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-5602.pdf