A Simple and Efficient Multi-Task Learning Approach for Conditioned Dialogue Generation
This work addresses data scarcity in conditioned dialogue generation, which is a domain-specific problem for natural language processing, and is incremental as it builds on existing multi-task learning techniques.
The paper tackles the problem of scarce labeled responses in conditioned dialogue generation by leveraging more easily collected labeled non-dialogue text data through a multi-task learning approach, resulting in outperforming state-of-the-art models and achieving larger performance improvements compared to previous methods.
Conditioned dialogue generation suffers from the scarcity of labeled responses. In this work, we exploit labeled non-dialogue text data related to the condition, which are much easier to collect. We propose a multi-task learning approach to leverage both labeled dialogue and text data. The 3 tasks jointly optimize the same pre-trained Transformer -- conditioned dialogue generation task on the labeled dialogue data, conditioned language encoding task and conditioned language generation task on the labeled text data. Experimental results show that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art models by leveraging the labeled texts, and it also obtains larger improvement in performance comparing to the previous methods to leverage text data.