Domain Adaptive Dialog Generation via Meta Learning
This addresses the challenge of building dialog systems for new domains with limited data, though it is incremental as it applies existing meta-learning techniques to dialog generation.
The paper tackles the problem of costly data collection for new dialog tasks by proposing a meta-learning method for domain adaptation, achieving state-of-the-art performance on a simulated dataset with minimal training samples.
Domain adaptation is an essential task in dialog system building because there are so many new dialog tasks created for different needs every day. Collecting and annotating training data for these new tasks is costly since it involves real user interactions. We propose a domain adaptive dialog generation method based on meta-learning (DAML). DAML is an end-to-end trainable dialog system model that learns from multiple rich-resource tasks and then adapts to new domains with minimal training samples. We train a dialog system model using multiple rich-resource single-domain dialog data by applying the model-agnostic meta-learning algorithm to dialog domain. The model is capable of learning a competitive dialog system on a new domain with only a few training examples in an efficient manner. The two-step gradient updates in DAML enable the model to learn general features across multiple tasks. We evaluate our method on a simulated dialog dataset and achieve state-of-the-art performance, which is generalizable to new tasks.