Database Search Results Disambiguation for Task-Oriented Dialog Systems

Kun Qian, Satwik Kottur, Ahmad Beirami, Shahin Shayandeh, Paul Crook, Alborz Geramifard, Zhou Yu, Chinnadhurai Sankar


Abstract
As task-oriented dialog systems are becoming increasingly popular in our lives, more realistic tasks have been proposed and explored. However, new practical challenges arise. For instance, current dialog systems cannot effectively handle multiplesearch results when querying a database, due to the lack of such scenarios in existing public datasets. In this paper, we propose Database Search Result (DSR) Disambiguation, a novel task that focuses on disambiguating database search results, which enhances user experience by allowing them to choose from multiple options instead of just one. To study this task, we augment the popular task-oriented dialog datasets (MultiWOZ and SGD) with turns that resolve ambiguities by (a) synthetically generating turns through a pre-defined grammar, and (b) collecting human paraphrases for a subset. We find that training on our augmented dialog data improves the model’s ability to deal with ambiguous scenarios, without sacrificing performance on unmodified turns. Furthermore, pre-fine tuning and multi-task learning help our model to improve performance on DSR-disambiguation even in the absence of in-domain data, suggesting that it can be learned as a universal dialog skill. Our data and code will be made publicly available.
Anthology ID:
2022.naacl-main.85
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies
Month:
July
Year:
2022
Address:
Seattle, United States
Editors:
Marine Carpuat, Marie-Catherine de Marneffe, Ivan Vladimir Meza Ruiz
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1158–1173
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.naacl-main.85
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.naacl-main.85
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Kun Qian, Satwik Kottur, Ahmad Beirami, Shahin Shayandeh, Paul Crook, Alborz Geramifard, Zhou Yu, and Chinnadhurai Sankar. 2022. Database Search Results Disambiguation for Task-Oriented Dialog Systems. In Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, pages 1158–1173, Seattle, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Database Search Results Disambiguation for Task-Oriented Dialog Systems (Qian et al., NAACL 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.naacl-main.85.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2022.naacl-main.85.mp4
Data
MultiWOZSGDSIMMC