Improving Long Distance Slot Carryover in Spoken Dialogue Systems
This addresses a specific bottleneck in dialogue state tracking for task-oriented spoken dialogue systems, with incremental improvements over previous methods.
The paper tackled the problem of poor performance in slot carryover for longer context dialogues in spoken dialogue systems by proposing joint modeling of slots, achieving competitive performance on benchmark datasets.
Tracking the state of the conversation is a central component in task-oriented spoken dialogue systems. One such approach for tracking the dialogue state is slot carryover, where a model makes a binary decision if a slot from the context is relevant to the current turn. Previous work on the slot carryover task used models that made independent decisions for each slot. A close analysis of the results show that this approach results in poor performance over longer context dialogues. In this paper, we propose to jointly model the slots. We propose two neural network architectures, one based on pointer networks that incorporate slot ordering information, and the other based on transformer networks that uses self attention mechanism to model the slot interdependencies. Our experiments on an internal dialogue benchmark dataset and on the public DSTC2 dataset demonstrate that our proposed models are able to resolve longer distance slot references and are able to achieve competitive performance.