Papers › A Simple but Effective BERT Model for Dialog State Tracking on Resource-Limited Systems

A Simple but Effective BERT Model for Dialog State Tracking on Resource-Limited Systems

28 Oct 2019arXiv:1910.12995archive 2025-07-28

Tuan Manh Lai, Quan Hung Tran, Trung Bui, Daisuke Kihara

In a task-oriented dialog system, the goal of dialog state tracking (DST) is to monitor the state of the conversation from the dialog history. Recently, many deep learning based methods have been proposed for the task. Despite their impressive performance, current neural architectures for DST are typically heavily-engineered and conceptually complex, making it difficult to implement, debug, and maintain them in a production setting. In this work, we propose a simple but effective DST model based on BERT. In addition to its simplicity, our approach also has a number of other advantages: (a) the number of parameters does not grow with the ontology size (b) the model can operate in situations where the domain ontology may change dynamically. Experimental results demonstrate that our BERT-based model outperforms previous methods by a large margin, achieving new state-of-the-art results on the standard WoZ 2.0 dataset. Finally, to make the model small and fast enough for resource-restricted systems, we apply the knowledge distillation method to compress our model. The final compressed model achieves comparable results with the original model while being 8x smaller and 7x faster.

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Tasks

Dialogue State TrackingKnowledge Distillation

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Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Dialogue State Tracking Wizard-of-Oz BERT-based tracker Joint 90.5 #4 of 10 Archive leaderboard report
Dialogue State Tracking Wizard-of-Oz BERT-based tracker Request 97.6 #4 of 10 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

AdamAttentionAttention DropoutBERTDSTDense ConnectionsDropoutKnowledge DistillationLayer NormalizationLinear LayerLinear Warmup With Linear DecayMulti-Head AttentionResidual ConnectionSoftmaxWeight DecayWordPiece

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