Papers › A Tailored Pre-Training Model for Task-Oriented Dialog Generation

A Tailored Pre-Training Model for Task-Oriented Dialog Generation

24 Apr 2020arXiv:2004.13835archive 2025-07-28

Jing Gu, Qingyang Wu, Chongruo wu, Weiyan Shi, Zhou Yu

The recent success of large pre-trained language models such as BERT and GPT-2 has suggested the effectiveness of incorporating language priors in downstream dialog generation tasks. However, the performance of pre-trained models on the dialog task is not as optimal as expected. In this paper, we propose a Pre-trained Role Alternating Language model (PRAL), designed specifically for task-oriented conversational systems. We adopted (Wu et al., 2019) that models two speakers separately. We also design several techniques, such as start position randomization, knowledge distillation, and history discount to improve pre-training performance. We introduce a task-oriented dialog pretraining dataset by cleaning 13 existing data sets. We test PRAL on three different downstream tasks. The results show that PRAL performs better or on par with state-of-the-art methods.

PaperPDFCode

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

Code

qywu/PRAL mentioned on GitHubpytorch report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Knowledge DistillationLanguage ModelingLanguage Modelling

1 archive task tag without a task page not shown.

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Methods

AdamAttentionAttention DropoutBERTBPECosine AnnealingDense ConnectionsDiscriminative Fine-TuningDropoutGPT-2Layer NormalizationLinear LayerLinear Warmup With Cosine AnnealingLinear Warmup With Linear DecayMulti-Head AttentionResidual ConnectionSoftmaxWeight DecayWordPiece

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections