CREDIT: Coarse-to-Fine Sequence Generation for Dialogue State Tracking

09/22/2020 ∙ by Zhi Chen, et al. ∙ 0 ∙ share

In dialogue systems, a dialogue state tracker aims to accurately find a compact representation of the current dialogue status, based on the entire dialogue history. While previous approaches often define dialogue states as a combination of separate triples (domain-slot-value), in this paper, we employ a structured state representation and cast dialogue state tracking as a sequence generation problem. Based on this new formulation, we propose a CoaRsE-to-fine DIalogue state Tracking (CREDIT) approach. Taking advantage of the structured state representation, which is a marked language sequence, we can further fine-tune the pre-trained model (by supervised learning) by optimizing natural language metrics with the policy gradient method. Like all generative state tracking methods, CREDIT does not rely on pre-defined dialogue ontology enumerating all possible slot values. Experiments demonstrate our tracker achieves encouraging joint goal accuracy for the five domains in MultiWOZ 2.0 and MultiWOZ 2.1 datasets.

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