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Liankai Huang

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TOD-DA: Towards Boosting the Robustness of Task-oriented Dialogue Modeling on Spoken Conversations

Dec 23, 2021
Xin Tian, Xinxian Huang, Dongfeng He, Yingzhan Lin, Siqi Bao, Huang He, Liankai Huang, Qiang Ju, Xiyuan Zhang, Jian Xie, Shuqi Sun, Fan Wang, Hua Wu, Haifeng Wang

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Task-oriented dialogue systems have been plagued by the difficulties of obtaining large-scale and high-quality annotated conversations. Furthermore, most of the publicly available datasets only include written conversations, which are insufficient to reflect actual human behaviors in practical spoken dialogue systems. In this paper, we propose Task-oriented Dialogue Data Augmentation (TOD-DA), a novel model-agnostic data augmentation paradigm to boost the robustness of task-oriented dialogue modeling on spoken conversations. The TOD-DA consists of two modules: 1) Dialogue Enrichment to expand training data on task-oriented conversations for easing data sparsity and 2) Spoken Conversation Simulator to imitate oral style expressions and speech recognition errors in diverse granularities for bridging the gap between written and spoken conversations. With such designs, our approach ranked first in both tasks of DSTC10 Track2, a benchmark for task-oriented dialogue modeling on spoken conversations, demonstrating the superiority and effectiveness of our proposed TOD-DA.

* Accepted to the AAAI-22 DSTC10 Workshop. First three authors contributed equally to this work 
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Amendable Generation for Dialogue State Tracking

Oct 29, 2021
Xin Tian, Liankai Huang, Yingzhan Lin, Siqi Bao, Huang He, Yunyi Yang, Hua Wu, Fan Wang, Shuqi Sun

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In task-oriented dialogue systems, recent dialogue state tracking methods tend to perform one-pass generation of the dialogue state based on the previous dialogue state. The mistakes of these models made at the current turn are prone to be carried over to the next turn, causing error propagation. In this paper, we propose a novel Amendable Generation for Dialogue State Tracking (AG-DST), which contains a two-pass generation process: (1) generating a primitive dialogue state based on the dialogue of the current turn and the previous dialogue state, and (2) amending the primitive dialogue state from the first pass. With the additional amending generation pass, our model is tasked to learn more robust dialogue state tracking by amending the errors that still exist in the primitive dialogue state, which plays the role of reviser in the double-checking process and alleviates unnecessary error propagation. Experimental results show that AG-DST significantly outperforms previous works in two active DST datasets (MultiWOZ 2.2 and WOZ 2.0), achieving new state-of-the-art performances.

* Presented at EMNLP 2021 NLP4ConvAI Workshop 
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