Neural Belief Tracker: Data-Driven Dialogue State Tracking

Nikola Mrkšić, Diarmuid Ó Séaghdha, Tsung-Hsien Wen, Blaise Thomson, Steve Young


Abstract
One of the core components of modern spoken dialogue systems is the belief tracker, which estimates the user’s goal at every step of the dialogue. However, most current approaches have difficulty scaling to larger, more complex dialogue domains. This is due to their dependency on either: a) Spoken Language Understanding models that require large amounts of annotated training data; or b) hand-crafted lexicons for capturing some of the linguistic variation in users’ language. We propose a novel Neural Belief Tracking (NBT) framework which overcomes these problems by building on recent advances in representation learning. NBT models reason over pre-trained word vectors, learning to compose them into distributed representations of user utterances and dialogue context. Our evaluation on two datasets shows that this approach surpasses past limitations, matching the performance of state-of-the-art models which rely on hand-crafted semantic lexicons and outperforming them when such lexicons are not provided.
Anthology ID:
P17-1163
Volume:
Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2017
Address:
Vancouver, Canada
Editors:
Regina Barzilay, Min-Yen Kan
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1777–1788
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/P17-1163
DOI:
10.18653/v1/P17-1163
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Nikola Mrkšić, Diarmuid Ó Séaghdha, Tsung-Hsien Wen, Blaise Thomson, and Steve Young. 2017. Neural Belief Tracker: Data-Driven Dialogue State Tracking. In Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 1777–1788, Vancouver, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Neural Belief Tracker: Data-Driven Dialogue State Tracking (Mrkšić et al., ACL 2017)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/P17-1163.pdf
Data
Wizard-of-OzDialogue State Tracking Challenge