No Arabic abstract
The ability to recognise emotions lends a conversational artificial intelligence a human touch. While emotions in chit-chat dialogues have received substantial attention, emotions in task-oriented dialogues have been largely overlooked despite having an equally important role, such as to signal failure or success. Existing emotion-annotated task-oriented corpora are limited in size, label richness, and public availability, creating a bottleneck for downstream tasks. To lay a foundation for studies on emotions in task-oriented dialogues, we introduce EmoWOZ, a large-scale manually emotion-annotated corpus of task-oriented dialogues. EmoWOZ is based on MultiWOZ, a multi-domain task-oriented dialogue dataset. It contains more than 11K dialogues with more than 83K emotion annotations of user utterances. In addition to Wizzard-of-Oz dialogues from MultiWOZ, we collect human-machine dialogues within the same set of domains to sufficiently cover the space of various emotions that can happen during the lifetime of a data-driven dialogue system. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first large-scale open-source corpus of its kind. We propose a novel emotion labelling scheme, which is tailored to task-oriented dialogues. We report a set of experimental results to show the usability of this corpus for emotion recognition and state tracking in task-oriented dialogues.
This paper presents a large-scale corpus for non-task-oriented dialogue response selection, which contains over 27K distinct prompts more than 82K responses collected from social media. To annotate this corpus, we define a 5-grade rating scheme: bad, mediocre, acceptable, good, and excellent, according to the relevance, coherence, informativeness, interestingness, and the potential to move a conversation forward. To test the validity and usefulness of the produced corpus, we compare various unsupervised and supervised models for response selection. Experimental results confirm that the proposed corpus is helpful in training response selection models.
Recent reinforcement learning algorithms for task-oriented dialogue system absorbs a lot of interest. However, an unavoidable obstacle for training such algorithms is that annotated dialogue corpora are often unavailable. One of the popular approaches addressing this is to train a dialogue agent with a user simulator. Traditional user simulators are built upon a set of dialogue rules and therefore lack response diversity. This severely limits the simulated cases for agent training. Later data-driven user models work better in diversity but suffer from data scarcity problem. To remedy this, we design a new corpus-free framework that taking advantage of their benefits. The framework builds a user simulator by first generating diverse dialogue data from templates and then build a new State2Seq user simulator on the data. To enhance the performance, we propose the State2Seq user simulator model to efficiently leverage dialogue state and history. Experiment results on an open dataset show that our user simulator helps agents achieve an improvement of 6.36% on success rate. State2Seq model outperforms the seq2seq baseline for 1.9 F-score.
Dialogue management (DM) decides the next action of a dialogue system according to the current dialogue state, and thus plays a central role in task-oriented dialogue systems. Since dialogue management requires to have access to not only local utterances, but also the global semantics of the entire dialogue session, modeling the long-range history information is a critical issue. To this end, we propose a novel Memory-Augmented Dialogue management model (MAD) which employs a memory controller and two additional memory structures, i.e., a slot-value memory and an external memory. The slot-value memory tracks the dialogue state by memorizing and updating the values of semantic slots (for instance, cuisine, price, and location), and the external memory augments the representation of hidden states of traditional recurrent neural networks through storing more context information. To update the dialogue state efficiently, we also propose slot-level attention on user utterances to extract specific semantic information for each slot. Experiments show that our model can obtain state-of-the-art performance and outperforms existing baselines.
Continual learning in task-oriented dialogue systems can allow us to add new domains and functionalities through time without incurring the high cost of a whole system retraining. In this paper, we propose a continual learning benchmark for task-oriented dialogue systems with 37 domains to be learned continuously in four settings, such as intent recognition, state tracking, natural language generation, and end-to-end. Moreover, we implement and compare multiple existing continual learning baselines, and we propose a simple yet effective architectural method based on residual adapters. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed architectural method and a simple replay-based strategy perform comparably well but they both achieve inferior performance to the multi-task learning baseline, in where all the data are shown at once, showing that continual learning in task-oriented dialogue systems is a challenging task. Furthermore, we reveal several trade-offs between different continual learning methods in term of parameter usage and memory size, which are important in the design of a task-oriented dialogue system. The proposed benchmark is released together with several baselines to promote more research in this direction.
This paper presents the Frames dataset (Frames is available at http://datasets.maluuba.com/Frames), a corpus of 1369 human-human dialogues with an average of 15 turns per dialogue. We developed this dataset to study the role of memory in goal-oriented dialogue systems. Based on Frames, we introduce a task called frame tracking, which extends state tracking to a setting where several states are tracked simultaneously. We propose a baseline model for this task. We show that Frames can also be used to study memory in dialogue management and information presentation through natural language generation.