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A Probabilistic End-To-End Task-Oriented Dialog Model with Latent Belief States towards Semi-Supervised Learning

17 Sep 2020EMNLP 2020 11arXiv:2009.08115archive 2025-07-28

Yichi Zhang, Zhijian Ou, Huixin Wang, Junlan Feng

Structured belief states are crucial for user goal tracking and database query in task-oriented dialog systems. However, training belief trackers often requires expensive turn-level annotations of every user utterance. In this paper we aim at alleviating the reliance on belief state labels in building end-to-end dialog systems, by leveraging unlabeled dialog data towards semi-supervised learning. We propose a probabilistic dialog model, called the LAtent BElief State (LABES) model, where belief states are represented as discrete latent variables and jointly modeled with system responses given user inputs. Such latent variable modeling enables us to develop semi-supervised learning under the principled variational learning framework. Furthermore, we introduce LABES-S2S, which is a copy-augmented Seq2Seq model instantiation of LABES. In supervised experiments, LABES-S2S obtains strong results on three benchmark datasets of different scales. In utilizing unlabeled dialog data, semi-supervised LABES-S2S significantly outperforms both supervised-only and semi-supervised baselines. Remarkably, we can reduce the annotation demands to 50% without performance loss on MultiWOZ.

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BeamState thu-spmi/LABES/vae_model.py official repository ran Apache-2.0 (permissive) · e928e03af1929603 · report
Encoder thu-spmi/LABES/vae_model.py official repository ran · metamorphic tier: deterministic Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 8da4276bc72ed659 · report
MultinomialKLDivergenceLoss thu-spmi/LABES/vae_model.py official repository ran fingerprinted Apache-2.0 (permissive) · ef419c77fa0af064 · report
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Tasks

End-To-End Dialogue Modelling

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
End-To-End Dialogue Modelling MULTIWOZ 2.1 LABES-S2S BLEU 18.3 #2 of 4 Archive leaderboard report
End-To-End Dialogue Modelling MULTIWOZ 2.1 LABES-S2S MultiWOZ (Inform) 78.1 #2 of 4 Archive leaderboard report
End-To-End Dialogue Modelling MULTIWOZ 2.1 LABES-S2S MultiWOZ (Success) 67.1 #2 of 4 Archive leaderboard report

Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.

Methods

LSTMSeq2SeqSigmoid ActivationTanh Activation

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