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Similarity-based Multi-Domain Dialogue State Tracking with Copy Mechanisms for Task-based Virtual Personal Assistants

Manotumruksa, Jarana; Dalton, Jeffrey; Meij, Edgar; Yilmaz, Emine; (2022) Similarity-based Multi-Domain Dialogue State Tracking with Copy Mechanisms for Task-based Virtual Personal Assistants. In: Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2022 (WWW'22). (pp. pp. 2006-2014). ACM Green open access

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Abstract

Task-based Virtual Personal Assistants (VPAs) rely on multi-domain Dialogue State Tracking (DST) models to monitor goals throughout a conversation. Previously proposed models show promising results on established benchmarks, but they have difficulty adapting to unseen domains due to domain-specific parameters in their model architectures. We propose a new Similarity-based Multi-domain Dialogue State Tracking model (SM-DST) that uses retrieval-inspired and fine-grained contextual token-level similarity approaches to efficiently and effectively track dialogue state. The key difference with state-of-the-art DST models is that SM-DST has a single model with shared parameters across domains and slots. Because we base SM-DST on similarity it allows the transfer of tracking information between semantically related domains as well as to unseen domains without retraining. Furthermore, we leverage copy mechanisms that consider the system’s response and the dialogue state from previous turn predictions, allowing it to more effectively track dialogue state for complex conversations. We evaluate SM-DST on three variants of the MultiWOZ DST benchmark datasets. The results demonstrate that SM-DST significantly and consistently outperforms state-of-the-art models across all datasets by absolute 5-18% and 3-25% in the few- and zero-shot settings, respectively.

Type: Proceedings paper
Title: Similarity-based Multi-Domain Dialogue State Tracking with Copy Mechanisms for Task-based Virtual Personal Assistants
Event: 31st ACM Web Conference (WWW)
Location: ELECTR NETWORK
Dates: 25 Apr 2022 - 29 Apr 2022
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1145/3485447.3512074
Publisher version: https://doi.org/10.1145/3485447.3512074
Language: English
Additional information: This version is the author accepted manuscript. For information on re-use, please refer to the publisher’s terms and conditions.
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science > Dept of Computer Science
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10217099
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