UniConv: A Unified Conversational Neural Architecture for Multi-domain Task-oriented Dialogues

Hung Le, Doyen Sahoo, Chenghao Liu, Nancy Chen, Steven C.H. Hoi

Dialog and Interactive Systems Long Paper

Gather-1E: Nov 17, Gather-1E: Nov 17 (02:00-04:00 UTC) [Join Gather Meeting]

You can open the pre-recorded video in a separate window.

Abstract: Building an end-to-end conversational agent for multi-domain task-oriented dialogues has been an open challenge for two main reasons. First, tracking dialogue states of multiple domains is non-trivial as the dialogue agent must obtain complete states from all relevant domains, some of which might have shared slots among domains as well as unique slots specifically for one domain only. Second, the dialogue agent must also process various types of information across domains, including dialogue context, dialogue states, and database, to generate natural responses to users. Unlike the existing approaches that are often designed to train each module separately, we propose "UniConv" - a novel unified neural architecture for end-to-end conversational systems in multi-domain task-oriented dialogues, which is designed to jointly train (i) a Bi-level State Tracker which tracks dialogue states by learning signals at both slot and domain level independently, and (ii) a Joint Dialogue Act and Response Generator which incorporates information from various input components and models dialogue acts and target responses simultaneously. We conduct comprehensive experiments in dialogue state tracking, context-to-text, and end-to-end settings on the MultiWOZ2.1 benchmark, achieving superior performance over competitive baselines.
NOTE: Video may display a random order of authors. Correct author list is at the top of this page.

Connected Papers in EMNLP2020

Similar Papers

TOD-BERT: Pre-trained Natural Language Understanding for Task-Oriented Dialogue
Chien-Sheng Wu, Steven C.H. Hoi, Richard Socher, Caiming Xiong,
MinTL: Minimalist Transfer Learning for Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems
Zhaojiang Lin, Andrea Madotto, Genta Indra Winata, Pascale Fung,
Task-Oriented Dialogue as Dataflow Synthesis
Jacob Andreas, John Bufe, David Burkett, Charles Chen, Josh Clausman, Jean Crawford, Kate Crim, Jordan DeLoach, Leah Dorner, Jason Eisner, Hao Fang, Alan Guo, David Hall, Kristin Hayes, Kellie Hill, Diana Ho, Wendy Iwaszuk, Smriti Jha, Dan Klein, Jayant Krishnamurthy, Theo Lanman, Percy Liang, Christopher Lin, Ilya Lintsbakh, Andy McGovern, Alexander Nisnevich, Adam Pauls, Brent Read, Dan Roth, Subhro Roy, Beth Short, Div Slomin, Ben Snyder, Stephon Striplin, Yu Su, Zachary Tellman, Sam Thomson, Andrei Vorobev, Izabela Witoszko, Jason Wolfe, Abby Wray, Yuchen Zhang, Alexander Zotov, Jesse Rusak, Dmitrij Petters,