Sequicity: Simplifying Task-oriented Dialogue Systems with Single Sequence-to-Sequence Architectures

Wenqiang Lei, Xisen Jin, Min-Yen Kan, Zhaochun Ren, Xiangnan He, Dawei Yin


Abstract
Existing solutions to task-oriented dialogue systems follow pipeline designs which introduces architectural complexity and fragility. We propose a novel, holistic, extendable framework based on a single sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) model which can be optimized with supervised or reinforcement learning. A key contribution is that we design text spans named belief spans to track dialogue believes, allowing task-oriented dialogue systems to be modeled in a seq2seq way. Based on this, we propose a simplistic Two Stage CopyNet instantiation which emonstrates good scalability: significantly reducing model complexity in terms of number of parameters and training time by a magnitude. It significantly outperforms state-of-the-art pipeline-based methods on large datasets and retains a satisfactory entity match rate on out-of-vocabulary (OOV) cases where pipeline-designed competitors totally fail.
Anthology ID:
P18-1133
Volume:
Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2018
Address:
Melbourne, Australia
Editors:
Iryna Gurevych, Yusuke Miyao
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1437–1447
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/P18-1133
DOI:
10.18653/v1/P18-1133
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Wenqiang Lei, Xisen Jin, Min-Yen Kan, Zhaochun Ren, Xiangnan He, and Dawei Yin. 2018. Sequicity: Simplifying Task-oriented Dialogue Systems with Single Sequence-to-Sequence Architectures. In Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 1437–1447, Melbourne, Australia. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Sequicity: Simplifying Task-oriented Dialogue Systems with Single Sequence-to-Sequence Architectures (Lei et al., ACL 2018)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/P18-1133.pdf
Poster:
 P18-1133.Poster.pdf
Code
 WING-NUS/sequicity