No Arabic abstract
The traditional dialogue state tracking (DST) task tracks the dialogue state given the past history of user and agent utterances. This paper proposes to replace the utterances before the current turn with a formal representation, which is used as the context in a semantic parser mapping the current user utterance to its formal meaning. In addition, we propose TOC (Task-Oriented Context), a formal dialogue state representation. This approach eliminates the need to parse a long history of natural language utterances; however, it adds complexity to the dialogue annotations. We propose Skim, a contextual semantic parser, trained with a sample-efficient training strategy: (1) a novel abstract dialogue state machine to synthesize training sets with TOC annotations; (2) data augmentation with automatic paraphrasing, (3) few-shot training, and (4) self-training. This paper also presents MultiWOZ 2.4, which consists of the full test set and a partial validation set of MultiWOZ 2.1, reannotated with the TOC representation. Skim achieves 78% turn-by-turn exact match accuracy and 85% slot accuracy, while our annotation effort amounts to only 2% of the training data used in MultiWOZ 2.1. The MultiWOZ 2.4 dataset will be released upon publication.
We explore the use of large pretrained language models as few-shot semantic parsers. The goal in semantic parsing is to generate a structured meaning representation given a natural language input. However, language models are trained to generate natural language. To bridge the gap, we use language models to paraphrase inputs into a controlled sublanguage resembling English that can be automatically mapped to a target meaning representation. With a small amount of data and very little code to convert into English-like representations, we provide a blueprint for rapidly bootstrapping semantic parsers and demonstrate good performance on multiple tasks.
Dialogue State Tracking (DST) forms a core component of automated chatbot based systems designed for specific goals like hotel, taxi reservation, tourist information, etc. With the increasing need to deploy such systems in new domains, solving the problem of zero/few-shot DST has become necessary. There has been a rising trend for learning to transfer knowledge from resource-rich domains to unknown domains with minimal need for additional data. In this work, we explore the merits of meta-learning algorithms for this transfer and hence, propose a meta-learner D-REPTILE specific to the DST problem. With extensive experimentation, we provide clear evidence of benefits over conventional approaches across different domains, methods, base models, and datasets with significant (5-25%) improvement over the baseline in a low-data setting. Our proposed meta-learner is agnostic of the underlying model and hence any existing state-of-the-art DST system can improve its performance on unknown domains using our training strategy.
In this work, we investigate the problems of semantic parsing in a few-shot learning setting. In this setting, we are provided with utterance-logical form pairs per new predicate. The state-of-the-art neural semantic parsers achieve less than 25% accuracy on benchmark datasets when k= 1. To tackle this problem, we proposed to i) apply a designated meta-learning method to train the model; ii) regularize attention scores with alignment statistics; iii) apply a smoothing technique in pre-training. As a result, our method consistently outperforms all the baselines in both one and two-shot settings.
Dense retrieval (DR) has the potential to resolve the query understanding challenge in conversational search by matching in the learned embedding space. However, this adaptation is challenging due to DR models extra needs for supervision signals and the long-tail nature of conversational search. In this paper, we present a Conversational Dense Retrieval system, ConvDR, that learns contextualized embeddings for multi-turn conversational queries and retrieves documents solely using embedding dot products. In addition, we grant ConvDR few-shot ability using a teacher-student framework, where we employ an ad hoc dense retriever as the teacher, inherit its document encodings, and learn a student query encoder to mimic the teacher embeddings on oracle reformulated queries. Our experiments on TREC CAsT and OR-QuAC demonstrate ConvDRs effectiveness in both few-shot and fully-supervised settings. It outperforms previous systems that operate in the sparse word space, matches the retrieval accuracy of oracle query reformulations, and is also more efficient thanks to its simplicity. Our analyses reveal that the advantages of ConvDR come from its ability to capture informative context while ignoring the unrelated context in previous conversation rounds. This makes ConvDR more effective as conversations evolve while previous systems may get confused by the increased noise from previous turns. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/thunlp/ConvDR.
The structured representation for semantic parsing in task-oriented assistant systems is geared towards simple understanding of one-turn queries. Due to the limitations of the representation, the session-based properties such as co-reference resolution and context carryover are processed downstream in a pipelined system. In this paper, we propose a semantic representation for such task-oriented conversational systems that can represent concepts such as co-reference and context carryover, enabling comprehensive understanding of queries in a session. We release a new session-based, compositional task-oriented parsing dataset of 20k sessions consisting of 60k utterances. Unlike Dialog State Tracking Challenges, the queries in the dataset have compositional forms. We propose a new family of Seq2Seq models for the session-based parsing above, which achieve better or comparable performance to the current state-of-the-art on ATIS, SNIPS, TOP and DSTC2. Notably, we improve the best known results on DSTC2 by up to 5 points for slot-carryover.