TOD-BERT: Pre-trained Natural Language Understanding for Task-Oriented Dialogue

Chien-Sheng Wu, Steven C.H. Hoi, Richard Socher, Caiming Xiong


Abstract
The underlying difference of linguistic patterns between general text and task-oriented dialogue makes existing pre-trained language models less useful in practice. In this work, we unify nine human-human and multi-turn task-oriented dialogue datasets for language modeling. To better model dialogue behavior during pre-training, we incorporate user and system tokens into the masked language modeling. We propose a contrastive objective function to simulate the response selection task. Our pre-trained task-oriented dialogue BERT (TOD-BERT) outperforms strong baselines like BERT on four downstream task-oriented dialogue applications, including intention recognition, dialogue state tracking, dialogue act prediction, and response selection. We also show that TOD-BERT has a stronger few-shot ability that can mitigate the data scarcity problem for task-oriented dialogue.
Anthology ID:
2020.emnlp-main.66
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:
917–929
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.66
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.emnlp-main.66
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Chien-Sheng Wu, Steven C.H. Hoi, Richard Socher, and Caiming Xiong. 2020. TOD-BERT: Pre-trained Natural Language Understanding for Task-Oriented Dialogue. In Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), pages 917–929, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
TOD-BERT: Pre-trained Natural Language Understanding for Task-Oriented Dialogue (Wu et al., EMNLP 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.66.pdf
Video:
 https://slideslive.com/38938861
Code
 jasonwu0731/ToD-BERT
Data
Wizard-of-Oz