Existing goal-oriented dialogue datasets focus mainly on identifying slots and values. However, customer support interactions in reality often involve agents following multi-step procedures derived from explicitly-defined company policies as well. To study customer service dialogue systems in more realistic settings, we introduce the Action-Based Conversations Dataset (ABCD), a fully-labeled dataset with over 10K human-to-human dialogues containing 55 distinct user intents requiring unique sequences of actions constrained by policies to achieve task success. We propose two additional dialog tasks, Action State Tracking and Cascading Dialogue Success, and establish a series of baselines involving large-scale, pre-trained language models on this dataset. Empirical results demonstrate that while more sophisticated networks outperform simpler models, a considerable gap (50.8% absolute accuracy) still exists to reach human-level performance on ABCD.

The performance of autoregressive models on natural language generation tasks has dramatically improved due to the adoption of deep, self-attentive architectures. However, these gains have come at the cost of hindering inference speed, making state-of-the-art models cumbersome to deploy in real-world, time-sensitive settings. We develop a compression technique for autoregressive models that is driven by an imitation learning perspective on knowledge distillation. The algorithm is designed to address the exposure bias problem. On prototypical language generation tasks such as translation and summarization, our method consistently outperforms other distillation algorithms, such as sequence-level knowledge distillation. Student models trained with our method attain 1.4 to 4.8 BLEU/ROUGE points higher than those trained from scratch, while increasing inference speed by up to 14 times in comparison to the teacher model.