Variational Hierarchical Dialog Autoencoder for Dialog State Tracking Data Augmentation

Kang Min Yoo, Hanbit Lee, Franck Dernoncourt, Trung Bui, Walter Chang, Sang-goo Lee


Abstract
Recent works have shown that generative data augmentation, where synthetic samples generated from deep generative models complement the training dataset, benefit NLP tasks. In this work, we extend this approach to the task of dialog state tracking for goaloriented dialogs. Due to the inherent hierarchical structure of goal-oriented dialogs over utterances and related annotations, the deep generative model must be capable of capturing the coherence among different hierarchies and types of dialog features. We propose the Variational Hierarchical Dialog Autoencoder (VHDA) for modeling the complete aspects of goal-oriented dialogs, including linguistic features and underlying structured annotations, namely speaker information, dialog acts, and goals. The proposed architecture is designed to model each aspect of goal-oriented dialogs using inter-connected latent variables and learns to generate coherent goal-oriented dialogs from the latent spaces. To overcome training issues that arise from training complex variational models, we propose appropriate training strategies. Experiments on various dialog datasets show that our model improves the downstream dialog trackers’ robustness via generative data augmentation. We also discover additional benefits of our unified approach to modeling goal-oriented dialogs – dialog response generation and user simulation, where our model outperforms previous strong baselines.
Anthology ID:
2020.emnlp-main.274
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)
Month:
November
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Bonnie Webber, Trevor Cohn, Yulan He, Yang Liu
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3406–3425
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.274
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.emnlp-main.274
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Kang Min Yoo, Hanbit Lee, Franck Dernoncourt, Trung Bui, Walter Chang, and Sang-goo Lee. 2020. Variational Hierarchical Dialog Autoencoder for Dialog State Tracking Data Augmentation. In Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), pages 3406–3425, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Variational Hierarchical Dialog Autoencoder for Dialog State Tracking Data Augmentation (Yoo et al., EMNLP 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.274.pdf
Video:
 https://slideslive.com/38939041
Code
 kaniblu/vhda