Shikib Mehri, Jinho Choi, Luis Fernando D'Haro et al.
This is a report on the NSF Future Directions Workshop on Automatic Evaluation of Dialog. The workshop explored the current state of the art along with its limitations and suggested promising directions for future work in this important and very rapidly changing area of research.
Renato Vukovic, Carel van Niekerk, Michael Heck et al.
Large language models (LLMs) are widely used as general-purpose knowledge sources, but they rely on parametric knowledge, limiting explainability and trustworthiness. In task-oriented dialogue (TOD) systems, this separation is explicit, using an external database structured by an explicit ontology to ensure explainability and controllability. However, building such ontologies requires manual labels or supervised training. We introduce TeQoDO: a Text-to-SQL task-oriented Dialogue Ontology construction method. Here, an LLM autonomously builds a TOD ontology from scratch without supervision using its inherent SQL programming capabilities combined with dialogue theory provided in the prompt. We show that TeQoDO outperforms transfer learning approaches, and its constructed ontology is competitive on a downstream dialogue state tracking task. Ablation studies demonstrate the key role of dialogue theory. TeQoDO also scales to allow construction of much larger ontologies, which we investigate on a Wikipedia and ArXiv dataset. We view this as a step towards broader application of ontologies to increase LLM explainability.
Lu Chen, Zhi Chen, Bowen Tan et al.
Dialogue policy plays an important role in task-oriented spoken dialogue systems. It determines how to respond to users. The recently proposed deep reinforcement learning (DRL) approaches have been used for policy optimization. However, these deep models are still challenging for two reasons: 1) Many DRL-based policies are not sample-efficient. 2) Most models don't have the capability of policy transfer between different domains. In this paper, we propose a universal framework, AgentGraph, to tackle these two problems. The proposed AgentGraph is the combination of GNN-based architecture and DRL-based algorithm. It can be regarded as one of the multi-agent reinforcement learning approaches. Each agent corresponds to a node in a graph, which is defined according to the dialogue domain ontology. When making a decision, each agent can communicate with its neighbors on the graph. Under AgentGraph framework, we further propose Dual GNN-based dialogue policy, which implicitly decomposes the decision in each turn into a high-level global decision and a low-level local decision. Experiments show that AgentGraph models significantly outperform traditional reinforcement learning approaches on most of the 18 tasks of the PyDial benchmark. Moreover, when transferred from the source task to a target task, these models not only have acceptable initial performance but also converge much faster on the target task.
Bo-Hsiang Tseng, Florian Kreyssig, Pawel Budzianowski et al.
Cross-domain natural language generation (NLG) is still a difficult task within spoken dialogue modelling. Given a semantic representation provided by the dialogue manager, the language generator should generate sentences that convey desired information. Traditional template-based generators can produce sentences with all necessary information, but these sentences are not sufficiently diverse. With RNN-based models, the diversity of the generated sentences can be high, however, in the process some information is lost. In this work, we improve an RNN-based generator by considering latent information at the sentence level during generation using the conditional variational autoencoder architecture. We demonstrate that our model outperforms the original RNN-based generator, while yielding highly diverse sentences. In addition, our model performs better when the training data is limited.
Lina Rojas-Barahona, Bo-Hsiang Tseng, Yinpei Dai et al.
In recent years, we have seen deep learning and distributed representations of words and sentences make impact on a number of natural language processing tasks, such as similarity, entailment and sentiment analysis. Here we introduce a new task: understanding of mental health concepts derived from Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT). We define a mental health ontology based on the CBT principles, annotate a large corpus where this phenomena is exhibited and perform understanding using deep learning and distributed representations. Our results show that the performance of deep learning models combined with word embeddings or sentence embeddings significantly outperform non-deep-learning models in this difficult task. This understanding module will be an essential component of a statistical dialogue system delivering therapy.
Lina M. Rojas-Barahona, Stefan Ultes, Pawel Budzianowski et al.
This paper presents two ways of dealing with scarce data in semantic decoding using N-Best speech recognition hypotheses. First, we learn features by using a deep learning architecture in which the weights for the unknown and known categories are jointly optimised. Second, an unsupervised method is used for further tuning the weights. Sharing weights injects prior knowledge to unknown categories. The unsupervised tuning (i.e. the risk minimisation) improves the F-Measure when recognising nearly zero-shot data on the DSTC3 corpus. This unsupervised method can be applied subject to two assumptions: the rank of the class marginal is assumed to be known and the class-conditional scores of the classifier are assumed to follow a Gaussian distribution.
Florian Kreyssig, Inigo Casanueva, Pawel Budzianowski et al.
User Simulators are one of the major tools that enable offline training of task-oriented dialogue systems. For this task the Agenda-Based User Simulator (ABUS) is often used. The ABUS is based on hand-crafted rules and its output is in semantic form. Issues arise from both properties such as limited diversity and the inability to interface a text-level belief tracker. This paper introduces the Neural User Simulator (NUS) whose behaviour is learned from a corpus and which generates natural language, hence needing a less labelled dataset than simulators generating a semantic output. In comparison to much of the past work on this topic, which evaluates user simulators on corpus-based metrics, we use the NUS to train the policy of a reinforcement learning based Spoken Dialogue System. The NUS is compared to the ABUS by evaluating the policies that were trained using the simulators. Cross-model evaluation is performed i.e. training on one simulator and testing on the other. Furthermore, the trained policies are tested on real users. In both evaluation tasks the NUS outperformed the ABUS.
Pei-Hao Su, Pawel Budzianowski, Stefan Ultes et al.
Deep reinforcement learning (RL) methods have significant potential for dialogue policy optimisation. However, they suffer from a poor performance in the early stages of learning. This is especially problematic for on-line learning with real users. Two approaches are introduced to tackle this problem. Firstly, to speed up the learning process, two sample-efficient neural networks algorithms: trust region actor-critic with experience replay (TRACER) and episodic natural actor-critic with experience replay (eNACER) are presented. For TRACER, the trust region helps to control the learning step size and avoid catastrophic model changes. For eNACER, the natural gradient identifies the steepest ascent direction in policy space to speed up the convergence. Both models employ off-policy learning with experience replay to improve sample-efficiency. Secondly, to mitigate the cold start issue, a corpus of demonstration data is utilised to pre-train the models prior to on-line reinforcement learning. Combining these two approaches, we demonstrate a practical approach to learn deep RL-based dialogue policies and demonstrate their effectiveness in a task-oriented information seeking domain.
Lina M. Rojas Barahona, Milica Gasic, Nikola Mrkšić et al.
This paper presents a deep learning architecture for the semantic decoder component of a Statistical Spoken Dialogue System. In a slot-filling dialogue, the semantic decoder predicts the dialogue act and a set of slot-value pairs from a set of n-best hypotheses returned by the Automatic Speech Recognition. Most current models for spoken language understanding assume (i) word-aligned semantic annotations as in sequence taggers and (ii) delexicalisation, or a mapping of input words to domain-specific concepts using heuristics that try to capture morphological variation but that do not scale to other domains nor to language variation (e.g., morphology, synonyms, paraphrasing ). In this work the semantic decoder is trained using unaligned semantic annotations and it uses distributed semantic representation learning to overcome the limitations of explicit delexicalisation. The proposed architecture uses a convolutional neural network for the sentence representation and a long-short term memory network for the context representation. Results are presented for the publicly available DSTC2 corpus and an In-car corpus which is similar to DSTC2 but has a significantly higher word error rate (WER).
Milica Gasic, Nikola Mrksic, Lina M. Rojas-Barahona et al.
Spoken dialogue systems allow humans to interact with machines using natural speech. As such, they have many benefits. By using speech as the primary communication medium, a computer interface can facilitate swift, human-like acquisition of information. In recent years, speech interfaces have become ever more popular, as is evident from the rise of personal assistants such as Siri, Google Now, Cortana and Amazon Alexa. Recently, data-driven machine learning methods have been applied to dialogue modelling and the results achieved for limited-domain applications are comparable to or outperform traditional approaches. Methods based on Gaussian processes are particularly effective as they enable good models to be estimated from limited training data. Furthermore, they provide an explicit estimate of the uncertainty which is particularly useful for reinforcement learning. This article explores the additional steps that are necessary to extend these methods to model multiple dialogue domains. We show that Gaussian process reinforcement learning is an elegant framework that naturally supports a range of methods, including prior knowledge, Bayesian committee machines and multi-agent learning, for facilitating extensible and adaptable dialogue systems.
Tsung-Hsien Wen, Milica Gasic, Nikola Mrksic et al.
Recently a variety of LSTM-based conditional language models (LM) have been applied across a range of language generation tasks. In this work we study various model architectures and different ways to represent and aggregate the source information in an end-to-end neural dialogue system framework. A method called snapshot learning is also proposed to facilitate learning from supervised sequential signals by applying a companion cross-entropy objective function to the conditioning vector. The experimental and analytical results demonstrate firstly that competition occurs between the conditioning vector and the LM, and the differing architectures provide different trade-offs between the two. Secondly, the discriminative power and transparency of the conditioning vector is key to providing both model interpretability and better performance. Thirdly, snapshot learning leads to consistent performance improvements independent of which architecture is used.
Pei-Hao Su, Milica Gasic, Nikola Mrksic et al.
We describe a two-step approach for dialogue management in task-oriented spoken dialogue systems. A unified neural network framework is proposed to enable the system to first learn by supervision from a set of dialogue data and then continuously improve its behaviour via reinforcement learning, all using gradient-based algorithms on one single model. The experiments demonstrate the supervised model's effectiveness in the corpus-based evaluation, with user simulation, and with paid human subjects. The use of reinforcement learning further improves the model's performance in both interactive settings, especially under higher-noise conditions.
Pei-Hao Su, Milica Gasic, Nikola Mrksic et al.
The ability to compute an accurate reward function is essential for optimising a dialogue policy via reinforcement learning. In real-world applications, using explicit user feedback as the reward signal is often unreliable and costly to collect. This problem can be mitigated if the user's intent is known in advance or data is available to pre-train a task success predictor off-line. In practice neither of these apply for most real world applications. Here we propose an on-line learning framework whereby the dialogue policy is jointly trained alongside the reward model via active learning with a Gaussian process model. This Gaussian process operates on a continuous space dialogue representation generated in an unsupervised fashion using a recurrent neural network encoder-decoder. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed framework is able to significantly reduce data annotation costs and mitigate noisy user feedback in dialogue policy learning.
Tsung-Hsien Wen, David Vandyke, Nikola Mrksic et al.
Teaching machines to accomplish tasks by conversing naturally with humans is challenging. Currently, developing task-oriented dialogue systems requires creating multiple components and typically this involves either a large amount of handcrafting, or acquiring costly labelled datasets to solve a statistical learning problem for each component. In this work we introduce a neural network-based text-in, text-out end-to-end trainable goal-oriented dialogue system along with a new way of collecting dialogue data based on a novel pipe-lined Wizard-of-Oz framework. This approach allows us to develop dialogue systems easily and without making too many assumptions about the task at hand. The results show that the model can converse with human subjects naturally whilst helping them to accomplish tasks in a restaurant search domain.
Tsung-Hsien Wen, Milica Gasic, Nikola Mrksic et al.
Moving from limited-domain natural language generation (NLG) to open domain is difficult because the number of semantic input combinations grows exponentially with the number of domains. Therefore, it is important to leverage existing resources and exploit similarities between domains to facilitate domain adaptation. In this paper, we propose a procedure to train multi-domain, Recurrent Neural Network-based (RNN) language generators via multiple adaptation steps. In this procedure, a model is first trained on counterfeited data synthesised from an out-of-domain dataset, and then fine tuned on a small set of in-domain utterances with a discriminative objective function. Corpus-based evaluation results show that the proposed procedure can achieve competitive performance in terms of BLEU score and slot error rate while significantly reducing the data needed to train generators in new, unseen domains. In subjective testing, human judges confirm that the procedure greatly improves generator performance when only a small amount of data is available in the domain.
Pei-Hao Su, David Vandyke, Milica Gasic et al.
Statistical spoken dialogue systems have the attractive property of being able to be optimised from data via interactions with real users. However in the reinforcement learning paradigm the dialogue manager (agent) often requires significant time to explore the state-action space to learn to behave in a desirable manner. This is a critical issue when the system is trained on-line with real users where learning costs are expensive. Reward shaping is one promising technique for addressing these concerns. Here we examine three recurrent neural network (RNN) approaches for providing reward shaping information in addition to the primary (task-orientated) environmental feedback. These RNNs are trained on returns from dialogues generated by a simulated user and attempt to diffuse the overall evaluation of the dialogue back down to the turn level to guide the agent towards good behaviour faster. In both simulated and real user scenarios these RNNs are shown to increase policy learning speed. Importantly, they do not require prior knowledge of the user's goal.
Pei-Hao Su, David Vandyke, Milica Gasic et al.
To train a statistical spoken dialogue system (SDS) it is essential that an accurate method for measuring task success is available. To date training has relied on presenting a task to either simulated or paid users and inferring the dialogue's success by observing whether this presented task was achieved or not. Our aim however is to be able to learn from real users acting under their own volition, in which case it is non-trivial to rate the success as any prior knowledge of the task is simply unavailable. User feedback may be utilised but has been found to be inconsistent. Hence, here we present two neural network models that evaluate a sequence of turn-level features to rate the success of a dialogue. Importantly these models make no use of any prior knowledge of the user's task. The models are trained on dialogues generated by a simulated user and the best model is then used to train a policy on-line which is shown to perform at least as well as a baseline system using prior knowledge of the user's task. We note that the models should also be of interest for evaluating SDS and for monitoring a dialogue in rule-based SDS.
Tsung-Hsien Wen, Milica Gasic, Dongho Kim et al.
The natural language generation (NLG) component of a spoken dialogue system (SDS) usually needs a substantial amount of handcrafting or a well-labeled dataset to be trained on. These limitations add significantly to development costs and make cross-domain, multi-lingual dialogue systems intractable. Moreover, human languages are context-aware. The most natural response should be directly learned from data rather than depending on predefined syntaxes or rules. This paper presents a statistical language generator based on a joint recurrent and convolutional neural network structure which can be trained on dialogue act-utterance pairs without any semantic alignments or predefined grammar trees. Objective metrics suggest that this new model outperforms previous methods under the same experimental conditions. Results of an evaluation by human judges indicate that it produces not only high quality but linguistically varied utterances which are preferred compared to n-gram and rule-based systems.
Tsung-Hsien Wen, Milica Gasic, Nikola Mrksic et al.
Natural language generation (NLG) is a critical component of spoken dialogue and it has a significant impact both on usability and perceived quality. Most NLG systems in common use employ rules and heuristics and tend to generate rigid and stylised responses without the natural variation of human language. They are also not easily scaled to systems covering multiple domains and languages. This paper presents a statistical language generator based on a semantically controlled Long Short-term Memory (LSTM) structure. The LSTM generator can learn from unaligned data by jointly optimising sentence planning and surface realisation using a simple cross entropy training criterion, and language variation can be easily achieved by sampling from output candidates. With fewer heuristics, an objective evaluation in two differing test domains showed the proposed method improved performance compared to previous methods. Human judges scored the LSTM system higher on informativeness and naturalness and overall preferred it to the other systems.