Papers › Structure Extraction in Task-Oriented Dialogues with Slot Clustering

Structure Extraction in Task-Oriented Dialogues with Slot Clustering

28 Feb 2022arXiv:2203.00073archive 2025-07-28

Liang Qiu, Chien-Sheng Wu, Wenhao Liu, Caiming Xiong

Extracting structure information from dialogue data can help us better understand user and system behaviors. In task-oriented dialogues, dialogue structure has often been considered as transition graphs among dialogue states. However, annotating dialogue states manually is expensive and time-consuming. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective approach for structure extraction in task-oriented dialogues. We first detect and cluster possible slot tokens with a pre-trained model to approximate dialogue ontology for a target domain. Then we track the status of each identified token group and derive a state transition structure. Empirical results show that our approach outperforms unsupervised baseline models by far in dialogue structure extraction. In addition, we show that data augmentation based on extracted structures enriches the surface formats of training data and can achieve a significant performance boost in dialogue response generation.

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salesforce/dialog-flow-extraction officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubpytorch report
Liang-Qiu/SVRNN-dialogues mentioned on GitHubpytorch report

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ClusteringData AugmentationResponse Generation

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