Toward Real-life Dialogue State Tracking Involving Negative Feedback Utterances

Puhai Yang, Heyan Huang*, Wei Wei, Xian Ling Mao

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

4 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Recently, the research of dialogue systems has been widely concerned, especially task-oriented dialogue systems, which have received increased attention due to their wide application prospect. As a core component, dialogue state tracking (DST) plays a key role in task-oriented dialogue systems, and its function is to parse natural language dialogues into dialogue state formed by slot-value pairs. It is well known that dialogue state tracking has been well studied and explored on current benchmark datasets such as the MultiWOZ. However, almost all current research completely ignores the user negative feedback utterances that exist in real-life conversations when a system error occurs, which often contains user-provided corrective information for the system error. Obviously, user negative feedback utterances can be used to correct the inevitable errors in automatic speech recognition and model generalization. Thus, in this paper, we will explore the role of negative feedback utterances in dialogue state tracking in detail through simulated negative feedback utterances. Specifically, due to the lack of dataset involving negative feedback utterances, first, we have to define the schema of user negative feedback utterances and propose a joint modeling method for feedback utterance generation and filtering. Then, we explore three aspects of interaction mechanism that should be considered in real-life conversations involving negative feedback utterances and propose evaluation metrics related to negative feedback utterances. Finally, on WOZ2.0 and MultiWOZ2.1 datasets, by constructing simulated negative feedback utterances in training and testing, we not only verify the important role of negative feedback utterances in dialogue state tracking, but also analyze the advantages and disadvantages of different interaction mechanisms involving negative feedback utterances, lighting future research on negative feedback utterances.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationKDD 2022 - Proceedings of the 28th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
Pages2222-2232
Number of pages11
ISBN (Electronic)9781450393850
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 14 Aug 2022
Event28th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, KDD 2022 - Washington, United States
Duration: 14 Aug 202218 Aug 2022

Publication series

NameProceedings of the ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining

Conference

Conference28th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, KDD 2022
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityWashington
Period14/08/2218/08/22

Keywords

  • dialogue state tracking
  • negative feedback
  • real-life dialogue

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