Transferable Dialogue Systems and User Simulators

Bo-Hsiang Tseng, Yinpei Dai, Florian Kreyssig, Bill Byrne


Abstract
One of the difficulties in training dialogue systems is the lack of training data. We explore the possibility of creating dialogue data through the interaction between a dialogue system and a user simulator. Our goal is to develop a modelling framework that can incorporate new dialogue scenarios through self-play between the two agents. In this framework, we first pre-train the two agents on a collection of source domain dialogues, which equips the agents to converse with each other via natural language. With further fine-tuning on a small amount of target domain data, the agents continue to interact with the aim of improving their behaviors using reinforcement learning with structured reward functions. In experiments on the MultiWOZ dataset, two practical transfer learning problems are investigated: 1) domain adaptation and 2) single-to-multiple domain transfer. We demonstrate that the proposed framework is highly effective in bootstrapping the performance of the two agents in transfer learning. We also show that our method leads to improvements in dialogue system performance on complete datasets.
Anthology ID:
2021.acl-long.13
Volume:
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
August
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Chengqing Zong, Fei Xia, Wenjie Li, Roberto Navigli
Venues:
ACL | IJCNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
152–166
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.13
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.acl-long.13
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Bo-Hsiang Tseng, Yinpei Dai, Florian Kreyssig, and Bill Byrne. 2021. Transferable Dialogue Systems and User Simulators. In Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 152–166, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Transferable Dialogue Systems and User Simulators (Tseng et al., ACL-IJCNLP 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.13.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.13.mp4
Code
 andy194673/joust