Meta-Reinforced Multi-Domain State Generator for Dialogue Systems

Yi Huang, Junlan Feng, Min Hu, Xiaoting Wu, Xiaoyu Du, Shuo Ma


Abstract
A Dialogue State Tracker (DST) is a core component of a modular task-oriented dialogue system. Tremendous progress has been made in recent years. However, the major challenges remain. The state-of-the-art accuracy for DST is below 50% for a multi-domain dialogue task. A learnable DST for any new domain requires a large amount of labeled in-domain data and training from scratch. In this paper, we propose a Meta-Reinforced Multi-Domain State Generator (MERET). Our first contribution is to improve the DST accuracy. We enhance a neural model based DST generator with a reward manager, which is built on policy gradient reinforcement learning (RL) to fine-tune the generator. With this change, we are able to improve the joint accuracy of DST from 48.79% to 50.91% on the MultiWOZ corpus. Second, we explore to train a DST meta-learning model with a few domains as source domains and a new domain as target domain. We apply the model-agnostic meta-learning algorithm (MAML) to DST and the obtained meta-learning model is used for new domain adaptation. Our experimental results show this solution is able to outperform the traditional training approach with extremely less training data in target domain.
Anthology ID:
2020.acl-main.636
Volume:
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Month:
July
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Dan Jurafsky, Joyce Chai, Natalie Schluter, Joel Tetreault
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
7109–7118
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-main.636
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.acl-main.636
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yi Huang, Junlan Feng, Min Hu, Xiaoting Wu, Xiaoyu Du, and Shuo Ma. 2020. Meta-Reinforced Multi-Domain State Generator for Dialogue Systems. In Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 7109–7118, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Meta-Reinforced Multi-Domain State Generator for Dialogue Systems (Huang et al., ACL 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-main.636.pdf
Video:
 http://slideslive.com/38929369