AirDialogue: An Environment for Goal-Oriented Dialogue Research

Wei Wei, Quoc Le, Andrew Dai, Jia Li


Abstract
Recent progress in dialogue generation has inspired a number of studies on dialogue systems that are capable of accomplishing tasks through natural language interactions. A promising direction among these studies is the use of reinforcement learning techniques, such as self-play, for training dialogue agents. However, current datasets are limited in size, and the environment for training agents and evaluating progress is relatively unsophisticated. We present AirDialogue, a large dataset that contains 301,427 goal-oriented conversations. To collect this dataset, we create a context-generator which provides travel and flight restrictions. We then ask human annotators to play the role of a customer or an agent and interact with the goal of successfully booking a trip given the restrictions. Key to our environment is the ease of evaluating the success of the dialogue, which is achieved by using ground-truth states (e.g., the flight being booked) generated by the restrictions. Any dialogue agent that does not generate the correct states is considered to fail. Our experimental results indicate that state-of-the-art dialogue models can only achieve a score of 0.17 while humans can reach a score of 0.91, which suggests significant opportunities for future improvement.
Anthology ID:
D18-1419
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
October-November
Year:
2018
Address:
Brussels, Belgium
Editors:
Ellen Riloff, David Chiang, Julia Hockenmaier, Jun’ichi Tsujii
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3844–3854
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D18-1419
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D18-1419
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Wei Wei, Quoc Le, Andrew Dai, and Jia Li. 2018. AirDialogue: An Environment for Goal-Oriented Dialogue Research. In Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 3844–3854, Brussels, Belgium. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
AirDialogue: An Environment for Goal-Oriented Dialogue Research (Wei et al., EMNLP 2018)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/D18-1419.pdf
Code
 google/airdialogue