Papers

Current researches on spoken language understanding (SLU) heavily are limited to a simple setting: the plain text-based SLU that takes the user utterance as input and generates its corresponding semantic frames (e.g., intent and slots). Unfortunately, such a simple setting may fail to work in complex real-world scenarios when an utterance is semantically ambiguous, which cannot be achieved by the text-based SLU models. In this paper, we first introduce a new and important task, Profile-based Spoken Language Understanding (ProSLU), which requires the model that not only relies on the plain text but also the supporting profile information to predict the correct intents and slots. To this end, we further introduce a large-scale human-annotated Chinese dataset with over 5K utterances and their corresponding supporting profile information (Knowledge Graph (KG), User Profile (UP), Context Awareness (CA)). In addition, we evaluate several state-of-the-art baseline models and explore a multi-level knowledge adapter to effectively incorporate profile information. Experimental results reveal that all existing text-based SLU models fail to work when the utterances are semantically ambiguous and our proposed framework can effectively fuse the supporting information for sentence-level intent detection and token-level slot filling. Finally, we summarize key challenges and provide new points for future directions, which hopes to facilitate the research.

poster session 3 @ red 5, poster session 8 @ red 5, oral session 8 @ red 5, poster session 3, poster session 8, oral session 8

This paper introduces a simple yet effective data-centric approach for the task of improving persona-conditioned dialogue agents. Prior model-centric approaches unquestioningly depend on the raw crowdsourced benchmark datasets such as Persona-Chat. In contrast, we aim to fix annotation artifacts in benchmarking, which is orthogonally applicable to any dialogue model. Specifically, we augment relevant personas to improve dialogue dataset/agent, by leveraging the primal-dual structure of the two tasks, predicting dialogue responses and personas based on each other. Experiments on Persona-Chat show that our approach outperforms pre-trained LMs by an 11.7 point gain in terms of accuracy.

poster session 3 @ red 5, poster session 8 @ red 5, oral session 8 @ red 5, poster session 3, poster session 8, oral session 8

The goal of building intelligent dialogue systems has largely been separately pursued under two paradigms: task-oriented dialogue (TOD) systems, which perform task-specific functions, and open-domain dialogue (ODD) systems, which focus on non-goal-oriented chitchat. The two dialogue modes can potentially be intertwined together seamlessly in the same conversation, as easily done by a friendly human assistant. Such ability is desirable in conversational agents, as the integration makes them more accessible and useful. Our paper addresses this problem of fusing TODs and ODDs in multi-turn dialogues. Based on the popular TOD dataset MultiWOZ, we build a new dataset FusedChat, by rewriting the existing TOD turns and adding new ODD turns. This procedure constructs conversation sessions containing exchanges from both dialogue modes. It features inter-mode contextual dependency, i.e., the dialogue turns from the two modes depend on each other. Rich dependency patterns such as co-reference and ellipsis are included. The new dataset, with 60k new human-written ODD turns and 5k re-written TOD turns, offers a benchmark to test a dialogue model's ability to perform inter-mode conversations. This is a more challenging task since the model has to determine the appropriate dialogue mode and generate the response based on the inter-mode context. However, such models would better mimic human-level conversation capabilities. We evaluate two baseline models on this task, including the classification-based two-stage models and the two-in-one fused models. We publicly release FusedChat (https://github.com/tomyoung903/FusedChat) and the baselines to propel future work on inter-mode dialogue systems.

poster session 3 @ red 5, poster session 8 @ red 5, oral session 8 @ red 5, poster session 3, poster session 8, oral session 8