Crossing the Conversational Chasm: A Primer on Multilingual Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems

04/17/2021
by   Evgeniia Razumovskaia, et al.
0

Despite the fact that natural language conversations with machines represent one of the central objectives of AI, and despite the massive increase of research and development efforts in conversational AI, task-oriented dialogue (ToD) – i.e., conversations with an artificial agent with the aim of completing a concrete task – is currently limited to a few narrow domains (e.g., food ordering, ticket booking) and a handful of major languages (e.g., English, Chinese). In this work, we provide an extensive overview of existing efforts in multilingual ToD and analyse the factors preventing the development of truly multilingual ToD systems. We identify two main challenges that combined hinder the faster progress in multilingual ToD: (1) current state-of-the-art ToD models based on large pretrained neural language models are data hungry; at the same time (2) data acquisition for ToD use cases is expensive and tedious. Most existing approaches to multilingual ToD thus rely on (zero- or few-shot) cross-lingual transfer from resource-rich languages (in ToD, this is basically only English), either by means of (i) machine translation or (ii) multilingual representation spaces. However, such approaches are currently not a viable solution for a large number of low-resource languages without parallel data and/or limited monolingual corpora. Finally, we discuss critical challenges and potential solutions by drawing parallels between ToD and other cross-lingual and multilingual NLP research.

READ FULL TEXT

page 1

page 2

page 3

page 4

research
05/20/2022

Multi2WOZ: A Robust Multilingual Dataset and Conversational Pretraining for Task-Oriented Dialog

Research on (multi-domain) task-oriented dialog (TOD) has predominantly ...
research
10/14/2021

GlobalWoZ: Globalizing MultiWoZ to Develop Multilingual Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems

Much recent progress in task-oriented dialogue (ToD) systems has been dr...
research
11/16/2020

Conversational agents for learning foreign languages – a survey

Conversational practice, while crucial for all language learners, can be...
research
03/15/2023

PRESTO: A Multilingual Dataset for Parsing Realistic Task-Oriented Dialogs

Research interest in task-oriented dialogs has increased as systems such...
research
10/06/2019

Multilingual Dialogue Generation with Shared-Private Memory

Existing dialog systems are all monolingual, where features shared among...
research
09/18/2021

DuRecDial 2.0: A Bilingual Parallel Corpus for Conversational Recommendation

In this paper, we provide a bilingual parallel human-to-human recommenda...
research
06/05/2021

BiToD: A Bilingual Multi-Domain Dataset For Task-Oriented Dialogue Modeling

Task-oriented dialogue (ToD) benchmarks provide an important avenue to m...

Please sign up or login with your details

Forgot password? Click here to reset