{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/in-context-learning-for-few-shot-dialogue","title":"In-Context Learning for Few-Shot Dialogue State Tracking","arxiv_id":"2203.08568","date":"2022-03-16","proceeding":null,"authors":["Yushi Hu","Chia-Hsuan Lee","Tianbao Xie","Tao Yu","Noah A. Smith","Mari Ostendorf"],"abstract":"Collecting and annotating task-oriented dialogues is time-consuming and costly; thus, zero and few shot learning could greatly benefit dialogue state tracking (DST). In this work, we propose an in-context learning (ICL) framework for zero-shot and few-shot learning DST, where a large pre-trained language model (LM) takes a test instance and a few exemplars as input, and directly decodes the dialogue state without any parameter updates. To better leverage a tabular domain description in the LM prompt, we reformulate DST into a text-to-SQL problem. We also propose a novel approach to retrieve annotated dialogues as exemplars. Empirical results on MultiWOZ show that our method IC-DST substantially outperforms previous fine-tuned state-of-the-art models in few-shot settings. In addition, we test IC-DST in zero-shot settings, in which the model only takes a fixed task instruction as input, finding that it outperforms previous zero-shot methods by a large margin.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.08568v3","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2203.08568v3.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"in-context-learning-for-few-shot-dialogue","repo_url":"https://github.com/yushi-hu/ic-dst","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"MIT"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"dialogue-state-tracking","task_name":"Dialogue State Tracking"},{"task_slug":"few-shot-learning","task_name":"Few-Shot Learning"},{"task_slug":"in-context-learning","task_name":"In-Context Learning"},{"task_slug":"language-modeling","task_name":"Language Modeling"},{"task_slug":"language-modelling","task_name":"Language Modelling"},{"task_slug":"text-to-sql","task_name":"Text to SQL"},{"task_slug":"text-to-sql","task_name":"Text-To-SQL"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"dst","method_name":"DST"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2203.08568","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2203.08568"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-24T18:15:14+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. 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