We propose AnyTOD, an end-to-end task-oriented dialog (TOD) system with zero-shot capability for unseen tasks. We view TOD as a program executed by a language model (LM), where program logic and ontology is provided by a designer in the form of a schema. To enable generalization onto unseen schemas and programs without prior training, AnyTOD adopts a neuro-symbolic approach. A neural LM keeps track of events that occur during a conversation, and a symbolic program implementing the dialog policy is executed to recommend next actions AnyTOD should take. This approach drastically reduces data annotation and model training requirements, addressing a long-standing challenge in TOD research: rapidly adapting a TOD system to unseen tasks and domains. We demonstrate state-of-the-art results on the STAR and ABCD benchmarks, as well as AnyTOD's strong zero-shot transfer capability in low-resource settings. In addition, we release STARv2, an updated version of the STAR dataset with richer data annotations, for benchmarking zero-shot end-to-end TOD models.

为了促进任务对话框中的零拍概括，本文建议语言模型作为数据（LAD）。LAD是创建各种准确的合成数据的范式，该数据传达了必要的结构约束，可用于训练下游神经对话模型。LAD利用GPT-3诱导语言多样性。LAD在意图预测（+15％），插槽填充（+31.4 f-1）和下一个动作预测（+11 F1）上，在零拍设置中获得了显着的性能增长。此外，互动的人类评估表明，与LAD的培训具有在人类对话中的培训竞争。LAD是开源的，并在https://github.com/shikib/lad上获得了代码和数据。

在与用户进行交流时，以任务为导向的对话系统必须根据对话历史记录在每个回合时跟踪用户的需求。这个称为对话状态跟踪（DST）的过程至关重要，因为它直接告知下游对话政策。近年来，DST引起了很大的兴趣，文本到文本范式作为受欢迎的方法。在本评论论文中，我们首先介绍任务及其相关的数据集。然后，考虑到最近出版的大量出版物，我们确定了2021 - 2022年研究的重点和研究进展。尽管神经方法已经取得了重大进展，但我们认为对话系统（例如概括性）的某些关键方面仍未得到充实。为了激励未来的研究，我们提出了几种研究途径。

Virtual assistants such as Google Assistant, Alexa and Siri provide a conversational interface to a large number of services and APIs spanning multiple domains. Such systems need to support an ever-increasing number of services with possibly overlapping functionality. Furthermore, some of these services have little to no training data available. Existing public datasets for task-oriented dialogue do not sufficiently capture these challenges since they cover few domains and assume a single static ontology per domain. In this work, we introduce the the Schema-Guided Dialogue (SGD) dataset, containing over 16k multi-domain conversations spanning 16 domains. Our dataset exceeds the existing task-oriented dialogue corpora in scale, while also highlighting the challenges associated with building large-scale virtual assistants. It provides a challenging testbed for a number of tasks including language understanding, slot filling, dialogue state tracking and response generation. Along the same lines, we present a schema-guided paradigm for task-oriented dialogue, in which predictions are made over a dynamic set of intents and slots, provided as input, using their natural language descriptions. This allows a single dialogue system to easily support a large number of services and facilitates simple integration of new services without requiring additional training data. Building upon the proposed paradigm, we release a model for dialogue state tracking capable of zero-shot generalization to new APIs, while remaining competitive in the regular setting.

Functionality and dialogue experience are two important factors of task-oriented dialogue systems. Conventional approaches with closed schema (e.g., conversational semantic parsing) often fail as both the functionality and dialogue experience are strongly constrained by the underlying schema. We introduce a new paradigm for task-oriented dialogue - Dialog2API - to greatly expand the functionality and provide seamless dialogue experience. The conversational model interacts with the environment by generating and executing programs triggering a set of pre-defined APIs. The model also manages the dialogue policy and interact with the user through generating appropriate natural language responses. By allowing generating free-form programs, Dialog2API supports composite goals by combining different APIs, whereas unrestricted program revision provides natural and robust dialogue experience. To facilitate Dialog2API, the core model is provided with API documents, an execution environment and optionally some example dialogues annotated with programs. We propose an approach tailored for the Dialog2API, where the dialogue states are represented by a stack of programs, with most recently mentioned program on the top of the stack. Dialog2API can work with many application scenarios such as software automation and customer service. In this paper, we construct a dataset for AWS S3 APIs and present evaluation results of in-context learning baselines.

Dialogue State Tracking (DST), a key component of task-oriented conversation systems, represents user intentions by determining the values of pre-defined slots in an ongoing dialogue. Existing approaches use hand-crafted templates and additional slot information to fine-tune and prompt large pre-trained language models and elicit slot values from the dialogue context. Significant manual effort and domain knowledge is required to design effective prompts, limiting the generalizability of these approaches to new domains and tasks. In this work, we propose DiSTRICT, a generalizable in-context tuning approach for DST that retrieves highly relevant training examples for a given dialogue to fine-tune the model without any hand-crafted templates. Experiments with the MultiWOZ benchmark datasets show that DiSTRICT outperforms existing approaches in various zero-shot and few-shot settings using a much smaller model, thereby providing an important advantage for real-world deployments that often have limited resource availability.

Diverse data formats and ontologies of task-oriented dialogue (TOD) datasets hinder us from developing general dialogue models that perform well on many datasets and studying knowledge transfer between datasets. To address this issue, we present ConvLab-3, a flexible dialogue system toolkit based on a unified TOD data format. In ConvLab-3, different datasets are transformed into one unified format and loaded by models in the same way. As a result, the cost of adapting a new model or dataset is significantly reduced. Compared to the previous releases of ConvLab (Lee et al., 2019b; Zhu et al., 2020b), ConvLab-3 allows developing dialogue systems with much more datasets and enhances the utility of the reinforcement learning (RL) toolkit for dialogue policies. To showcase the use of ConvLab-3 and inspire future work, we present a comprehensive study with various settings. We show the benefit of pre-training on other datasets for few-shot fine-tuning and RL, and encourage evaluating policy with diverse user simulators.

这项工作提出了一个新的对话数据集，即cookdial，该数据集促进了对任务知识了解的面向任务的对话系统的研究。该语料库包含260个以人类对任务为导向的对话框，其中代理给出了配方文档，指导用户烹饪菜肴。 Cookdial中的对话框展示了两个独特的功能：（i）对话流与支持文档之间的程序对齐； （ii）复杂的代理决策涉及分割长句子，解释硬说明并在对话框上下文中解决核心。此外，我们在假定的面向任务的对话框系统中确定了三个具有挑战性的（子）任务：（1）用户问题理解，（2）代理操作框架预测和（3）代理响应生成。对于这些任务中的每一个，我们都会开发一个神经基线模型，我们在cookdial数据集上进行了评估。我们公开发布烹饪数据集，包括对话框和食谱文档的丰富注释，以刺激对特定于域的文档接地对话框系统的进一步研究。

在现实世界中的对话系统中，生成的响应必须满足几个互锁的限制：内容丰富，真实且易于控制。语言生成中的两个主要范式 - 神经语言建模和基于规则的一代 - 都难以满足这些约束。即使是最好的神经模型，也容易出现信息的幻觉和省略，而现有的基于规则的形式的形式使得很难编写既灵活又流利的语法。我们描述了对话响应产生的混合体系结构，结合了两种方法的优势。该体系结构有两个组件。首先，使用新的正式框架定义的基于规则的内容选择模型，称为数据流转导，该模型使用声明性规则将对话代理的计算（表示为数据流图）转换为代表上下文可接受响应空间的无上下文语法。其次，使用这些语法来限制神经语言模型的输出的受约束解码过程，该过程选择流利的话语。最终的系统在人类对流利，相关性和真实性的评估中的表现都优于基于规则的方法和学识渊博的方法。

用户模拟器（USS）通常用于通过增强学习训练面向任务的对话系统（DSS）。相互作用通常是在语义层面上以提高效率的，但是从语义动作到自然语言仍然存在差距，这会导致培训和部署环境之间的不匹配。在培训期间，将自然语言生成（NLG）模块与USS结合在一起可以部分解决此问题。但是，由于US的策略和NLG是单独优化的，因此在给定的情况下，这些模拟的用户话语可能不够自然。在这项工作中，我们提出了一个基于生成变压器的用户模拟器（Gentus）。 Gentus由编码器结构组成，这意味着它可以共同优化用户策略和自然语言。 Gentus既产生语义动作又产生自然语言话语，从而保留了解释性和增强语言的变化。另外，通过将输入和输出表示为单词序列以及使用大型的预训练语言模型，我们可以在功能表示中实现普遍性。我们通过自动指标和人类评估评估绅士。我们的结果表明，绅士会产生更多的自然语言，并能够以零拍的方式转移到看不见的本体论中。此外，通过加强学习为培训专业用户模拟器打开大门，可以进一步塑造其行为。

Task-oriented dialogue (TOD) systems are mainly based on the slot-filling-based TOD (SF-TOD) framework, in which dialogues are broken down into smaller, controllable units (i.e., slots) to fulfill a specific task. A series of approaches based on this framework achieved remarkable success on various TOD benchmarks. However, we argue that the current TOD benchmarks are limited to surrogate real-world scenarios and that the current TOD models are still a long way from unraveling the scenarios. In this position paper, we first identify current status and limitations of SF-TOD systems. After that, we explore the WebTOD framework, the alternative direction for building a scalable TOD system when a web/mobile interface is available. In WebTOD, the dialogue system learns how to understand the web/mobile interface that the human agent interacts with, powered by a large-scale language model.

我们在面向任务为导向的对话框（TOD）的端到端学习中提出了一种新问题，其中对话系统模仿故障排除代理，该故障排除代理通过诊断其问题（例如，汽车而未启动）帮助用户。这些对话框基于特定于域的流程图，该代理在对话期间应该遵循代理。我们的任务暴露了神经TOD的新颖技术挑战，例如在没有显式注释的情况下对流程图的话语接地，当用户询问澄清问题时，提及额外的手动页面，以及在测试时间遵循看不见的流程图。我们释放由2,738个对话框组成的数据集（浮雕），该对话框为12个不同的故障排除流程图。我们还设计了一个神经模型，扑腾，它使用检索增强的生成架构来训练对话框。我们的实验发现，Flonet可以对未来的流程图进行零射流传输，并为未来的研究设定强大的基线。

由于面向任务对话框（TOD）系统中不同模块的标签成本很高，但实践中的主要挑战是学习具有最少标记数据的不同任务。最近，通过预先训练的语言模型（PLMS）提示方法对TOD的几次射门学习显示了有希望的结果。为了更好地利用PLMS的力量，本文提出了利用额外任务特定指令的全面指导（CINS）。我们在TOD中设计了指令的架构（定义，约束，提示）指令及其定制实现，即在TOD中的三个重要下游任务，即意图分类，对话状态跟踪和自然语言生成。采用序列到序列模型（T5）来解决统一框架中的这三个任务。在具有小验证数据的现实少量学习场景中对这些TOD任务进行了广泛的实验。经验结果表明，所提出的CINS方法一致地改善了Finetune PLM具有原始输入或简短提示的技术。

针对任务导向的对话系统的强大状态跟踪目前仍然限于一些流行语言。本文显示，给定以一种语言设置的大规模对话数据，我们可以使用机器翻译自动为其他语言生成有效的语义解析器。我们提出了对话数据集的自动翻译，并进行对齐，以确保插槽值的忠实翻译，并消除以前的基准中使用的昂贵人类监督。我们还提出了一种新的上下文语义解析模型，它编码正式的插槽和值，只有最后一个代理和用户话语。我们表明，简洁的表示降低了翻译误差的复合效果，而不会损害实践中的准确性。我们评估我们对几个对话状态跟踪基准的方法。在Risawoz，Crosswoz，Crosswoz-Zh和Multiwoz-Zh Datasets，我们将最先进的技术提高11％，17％，20％和0.3％，以共同的目标准确度。我们为所有三个数据集提供了全面的错误分析，显示错误注释可以模糊模型质量的判断。最后，我们使用推荐方法创建了Risawoz英语和德语数据集。在这些数据集中，准确性在原始的11％以内，表示可能的高精度多语言对话数据集，而无需依赖昂贵的人类注释。

在过去的十年中，对对话系统的兴趣已经大大增长。从扩展过程中，也有兴趣开发和改进意图分类和插槽填充模型，这是两个组件，这些组件通常在以任务为导向的对话框系统中使用。此外，良好的评估基准对于帮助比较和分析结合此类模型的系统很重要。不幸的是，该领域的许多文献仅限于对相对较少的基准数据集的分析。为了促进针对任务的对话系统的更强大的分析，我们对意图分类和插槽填充任务进行了公开可用数据集的调查。我们分类每个数据集的重要特征，并就每个数据集的适用性，优势和劣势进行讨论。我们的目标是，这项调查有助于提高这些数据集的可访问性，我们希望它们能够在未来评估意图分类和填充插槽模型中用于以任务为导向的对话框系统。

体现的代理需要能够在自然语言中互动理解任务描述，并提出适当的后续问题以获取必要的信息，以有效地成功完成各种用户的任务。在这项工作中，我们提出了一组对话框，用于建模此类对话框，并注释教学数据集，其中包括3,000多个位置，以任务为导向的对话（总计包含39.5k个话语），并具有对话框ACT。 Teach-da是对Dialog ACT的第一个大型数据集注释，用于具体任务完成。此外，我们在培训模型中证明了该注释的数据集在标记给定话语的对话框行为中的使用，预测给定对话框历史记录的下一个响应的对话框行为，并使用对话框行为指导代理商的非第二语言行为。特别是，我们对对话记录任务的教学执行执行的实验，该模型预测在体现任务完成环境中要执行的低级操作的顺序，证明对话框行为可以将最终任务成功提高2分，以提高最终任务成功率到没有对话行为的系统。

Training dialogue systems often entails dealing with noisy training examples and unexpected user inputs. Despite their prevalence, there currently lacks an accurate survey of dialogue noise, nor is there a clear sense of the impact of each noise type on task performance. This paper addresses this gap by first constructing a taxonomy of noise encountered by dialogue systems. In addition, we run a series of experiments to show how different models behave when subjected to varying levels of noise and types of noise. Our results reveal that models are quite robust to label errors commonly tackled by existing denoising algorithms, but that performance suffers from dialogue-specific noise. Driven by these observations, we design a data cleaning algorithm specialized for conversational settings and apply it as a proof-of-concept for targeted dialogue denoising.

We present BotSIM, a data-efficient end-to-end Bot SIMulation toolkit for commercial text-based task-oriented dialog (TOD) systems. BotSIM consists of three major components: 1) a Generator that can infer semantic-level dialog acts and entities from bot definitions and generate user queries via model-based paraphrasing; 2) an agenda-based dialog user Simulator (ABUS) to simulate conversations with the dialog agents; 3) a Remediator to analyze the simulated conversations, visualize the bot health reports and provide actionable remediation suggestions for bot troubleshooting and improvement. We demonstrate BotSIM's effectiveness in end-to-end evaluation, remediation and multi-intent dialog generation via case studies on two commercial bot platforms. BotSIM's "generation-simulation-remediation" paradigm accelerates the end-to-end bot evaluation and iteration process by: 1) reducing manual test cases creation efforts; 2) enabling a holistic gauge of the bot in terms of NLU and end-to-end performance via extensive dialog simulation; 3) improving the bot troubleshooting process with actionable suggestions. A demo of our system can be found at https://tinyurl.com/mryu74cd and a demo video at https://youtu.be/qLi5iSoly30. We have open-sourced the toolkit at https://github.com/salesforce/botsim

零/几次转移到看不见的服务是面向任务的对话研究中的一个关键挑战。架构引导的对话（SGD）数据集引入了一个范式，以使模型通过模式以零摄影的方式支持任何服务，该模型将服务API描述为自然语言的模型。我们通过设计SGD -X来探索对话系统对模式中语言变化的鲁棒性 - 一种基准，该基准扩展了SGD的语义上相似但风格相似但在每个模式上具有相似风格的变体。我们观察到，两种顶级状态跟踪模型无法通过模式变体概括，这些模型通过联合目标准确性和用于测量模式灵敏度的新型指标来衡量。此外，我们提出了一种简单的模型数据扩展方法，以改善模式鲁棒性。

随着未来以数据为中心的决策，对数据库的无缝访问至关重要。关于创建有效的文本到SQL（Text2SQL）模型以访问数据库的数据有广泛的研究。使用自然语言是可以通过有效访问数据库（尤其是对于非技术用户）来弥合数据和结果之间差距的最佳接口之一。它将打开门，并在精通技术技能或不太熟练的查询语言的用户中引起极大的兴趣。即使提出或研究了许多基于深度学习的算法，在现实工作场景中使用自然语言来解决数据查询问题仍然非常具有挑战性。原因是在不同的研究中使用不同的数据集，这带来了其局限性和假设。同时，我们确实缺乏对这些提议的模型及其对其训练的特定数据集的局限性的彻底理解。在本文中，我们试图介绍过去几年研究的24种神经网络模型的整体概述，包括其涉及卷积神经网络，经常性神经网络，指针网络，强化学习，生成模型等的架构。我们还概述11个数据集，这些数据集被广泛用于训练Text2SQL技术的模型。我们还讨论了无缝数据查询中文本2SQL技术的未来应用可能性。