Granular Change Accuracy: A More Accurate Performance Metric for Dialogue State Tracking

Current metrics for evaluating Dialogue State Tracking (DST) systems exhibit three primary limitations. They: i) erroneously presume a uniform distribution of slots throughout the dialog, ii) neglect to assign partial scores for individual turns, iii) frequently overestimate or underestimate performance by repeatedly counting the models' successful or failed predictions. To address these shortcomings, we introduce a novel metric: Granular Change Accuracy (GCA). GCA focuses on evaluating the predicted changes in dialogue state over the entire dialogue history. Benchmarking reveals that GCA effectively reduces biases arising from distribution uniformity and the positioning of errors across turns, resulting in a more precise evaluation. Notably, we find that these biases are particularly pronounced when evaluating few-shot or zero-shot trained models, becoming even more evident as the model's error rate increases. Hence, GCA offers significant promise, particularly for assessing models trained with limited resources. Our GCA implementation is a useful addition to the pool of DST metrics.

CESAR: Automatic Induction of Compositional Instructions for Multi-turn Dialogs

Instruction-based multitasking has played a critical role in the success of large language models (LLMs) in multi-turn dialog applications. While publicly available LLMs have shown promising performance, when exposed to complex instructions with multiple constraints, they lag against state-of-the-art models like ChatGPT. In this work, we hypothesize that the availability of large-scale complex demonstrations is crucial in bridging this gap. Focusing on dialog applications, we propose a novel framework, CESAR, that unifies a large number of dialog tasks in the same format and allows programmatic induction of complex instructions without any manual effort. We apply CESAR on InstructDial, a benchmark for instruction-based dialog tasks. We further enhance InstructDial with new datasets and tasks and utilize CESAR to induce complex tasks with compositional instructions. This results in a new benchmark called InstructDial++, which includes 63 datasets with 86 basic tasks and 68 composite tasks. Through rigorous experiments, we demonstrate the scalability of CESAR in providing rich instructions. Models trained on InstructDial++ can follow compositional prompts, such as prompts that ask for multiple stylistic constraints.

Prompter: Zero-shot Adaptive Prefixes for Dialogue State Tracking Domain Adaptation

A challenge in the Dialogue State Tracking (DST) field is adapting models to new domains without using any supervised data, zero-shot domain adaptation. Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning (PETL) has the potential to address this problem due to its robustness. However, it has yet to be applied to the zero-shot scenarios, as it is not clear how to apply it unsupervisedly. Our method, Prompter, uses descriptions of target domain slots to generate dynamic prefixes that are concatenated to the key and values at each layer's self-attention mechanism. This allows for the use of prefix-tuning in zero-shot. Prompter outperforms previous methods on both the MultiWOZ and SGD benchmarks. In generating prefixes, our analyses find that Prompter not only utilizes the semantics of slot descriptions but also how often the slots appear together in conversation. Moreover, Prompter's gains are due to its improved ability to distinguish "none"-valued dialogue slots, compared against baselines.

A Simple But Effective Approach to n-shot Task-Oriented Dialogue Augmentation

The collection and annotation of task-oriented conversational data is a costly and time-consuming manner. Many augmentation techniques have been proposed to improve the performance of state-of-the-art (SOTA) systems in new domains that lack the necessary amount of data for training. However, these augmentation techniques (e.g. paraphrasing) also require some mediocre amount of data since they use learning-based approaches. This makes using SOTA systems in emerging low-resource domains infeasible. We, to tackle this problem, introduce a framework, that creates synthetic task-oriented dialogues in a fully automatic manner, which operates with input sizes of as small as a few dialogues. Our framework uses the simple idea that each turn-pair in a task-oriented dialogue has a certain function and exploits this idea to mix them creating new dialogues. We evaluate our framework within a low-resource setting by integrating it with a SOTA model TRADE in the dialogue state tracking task and observe significant improvements in the fine-tuning scenarios in several domains. We conclude that this end-to-end dialogue augmentation framework can be a crucial tool for natural language understanding performance in emerging task-oriented dialogue domains.