End-to-End Task-Completion Neural Dialogue Systems
This addresses the robustness issue in dialogue systems for users needing task assistance, though it is an incremental improvement over existing modular approaches.
The paper tackles the error accumulation problem in modularized task-completion dialogue systems by introducing an end-to-end neural framework that directly interacts with a database, showing it outperforms baselines in objective and subjective evaluations and is robust to noise in experiments.
One of the major drawbacks of modularized task-completion dialogue systems is that each module is trained individually, which presents several challenges. For example, downstream modules are affected by earlier modules, and the performance of the entire system is not robust to the accumulated errors. This paper presents a novel end-to-end learning framework for task-completion dialogue systems to tackle such issues. Our neural dialogue system can directly interact with a structured database to assist users in accessing information and accomplishing certain tasks. The reinforcement learning based dialogue manager offers robust capabilities to handle noises caused by other components of the dialogue system. Our experiments in a movie-ticket booking domain show that our end-to-end system not only outperforms modularized dialogue system baselines for both objective and subjective evaluation, but also is robust to noises as demonstrated by several systematic experiments with different error granularity and rates specific to the language understanding module.