TOD-Flow: Modeling the Structure of Task-Oriented Dialogues

Sungryull Sohn, Yiwei Lyu, Anthony Zhe Liu, Lajanugen Logeswaran, Dong-Ki Kim, Dongsub Shim, Honglak Lee

Submission Type: Regular Long Paper

Submission Track: Dialogue and Interactive Systems

Submission Track 2: Interpretability, Interactivity, and Analysis of Models for NLP

Keywords: Task-oriented Dialogue, Dialog policy learning, interpretability, precondition inference

TL;DR: We introduce a TOD-flow graph, that enhances the transparency, controllability, and accuracy of task-oriented dialogue systems, outperforming previous dialog policy and end-to-end dialog models on SGD and MultiWOZ dataset.

Abstract: Task-Oriented Dialogue (TOD) systems have become crucial components in interactive artificial intelligence applications. While recent advances have capitalized on pre-trained language models (PLMs), they exhibit limitations regarding transparency and controllability. To address these challenges, we propose a novel approach focusing on inferring the TOD-flow graph from dialogue data annotated with dialog acts, uncovering the underlying task structure in the form of a graph. The inferred TOD-flow graph can be easily integrated with any dialogue model to improve its prediction performance, transparency, and controllability. Our TOD-flow graph learns what a model can, should, and should not predict, effectively reducing the search space and providing a rationale for the model's prediction. We show that the proposed TOD-flow graph better resemble human-annotated graphs compared to prior approaches. Furthermore, when combined with several dialogue policies and end-to-end dialogue models, we demonstrate that our approach significantly improves dialog act classification and end-to-end response generation performance in the MultiWOZ and SGD benchmarks.

Submission Number: 2366