Sanuj Sharma


2019

pdf bib
Improving Dialogue State Tracking by Discerning the Relevant Context
Sanuj Sharma | Prafulla Kumar Choubey | Ruihong Huang
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers)

A typical conversation comprises of multiple turns between participants where they go back and forth between different topics. At each user turn, dialogue state tracking (DST) aims to estimate user’s goal by processing the current utterance. However, in many turns, users implicitly refer to the previous goal, necessitating the use of relevant dialogue history. Nonetheless, distinguishing relevant history is challenging and a popular method of using dialogue recency for that is inefficient. We, therefore, propose a novel framework for DST that identifies relevant historical context by referring to the past utterances where a particular slot-value changes and uses that together with weighted system utterance to identify the relevant context. Specifically, we use the current user utterance and the most recent system utterance to determine the relevance of a system utterance. Empirical analyses show that our method improves joint goal accuracy by 2.75% and 2.36% on WoZ 2.0 and Multi-WoZ restaurant domain datasets respectively over the previous state-of-the-art GLAD model.