Transferable Multi-Domain State Generator for Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems

Chien-Sheng Wu, Andrea Madotto, Ehsan Hosseini-Asl, Caiming Xiong, Richard Socher, Pascale Fung


Abstract
Over-dependence on domain ontology and lack of sharing knowledge across domains are two practical and yet less studied problems of dialogue state tracking. Existing approaches generally fall short when tracking unknown slot values during inference and often have difficulties in adapting to new domains. In this paper, we propose a Transferable Dialogue State Generator (TRADE) that generates dialogue states from utterances using copy mechanism, facilitating transfer when predicting (domain, slot, value) triplets not encountered during training. Our model is composed of an utterance encoder, a slot gate, and a state generator, which are shared across domains. Empirical results demonstrate that TRADE achieves state-of-the-art 48.62% joint goal accuracy for the five domains of MultiWOZ, a human-human dialogue dataset. In addition, we show the transferring ability by simulating zero-shot and few-shot dialogue state tracking for unseen domains. TRADE achieves 60.58% joint goal accuracy in one of the zero-shot domains, and is able to adapt to few-shot cases without forgetting already trained domains.
Anthology ID:
P19-1078
Volume:
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Month:
July
Year:
2019
Address:
Florence, Italy
Editors:
Anna Korhonen, David Traum, Lluís Màrquez
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
808–819
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/P19-1078
DOI:
10.18653/v1/P19-1078
Award:
 Outstanding Paper
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Chien-Sheng Wu, Andrea Madotto, Ehsan Hosseini-Asl, Caiming Xiong, Richard Socher, and Pascale Fung. 2019. Transferable Multi-Domain State Generator for Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems. In Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 808–819, Florence, Italy. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Transferable Multi-Domain State Generator for Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems (Wu et al., ACL 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/P19-1078.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/P19-1078.mp4
Code
 jasonwu0731/trade-dst +  additional community code
Data
MultiWOZ