Slot Sharing Mechanism in Multi-domain Dialogue Systems

• Bruno Eidi Nishimoto USP / Itaú Unibanco https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8473-5535
• Anna Helena Reali Costa USP https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7309-4528

Resumo

Task-oriented dialogue systems are very important due to their wide range of applications. In particular, those tasks that involve multiple domains have gained increasing attention in recent years, as the actual tasks performed by virtual assistants often span multiple domains. In this work, we propose the Divide-and-Conquer Distributed Architecture with Slot Sharing Mechanism (DCDA-S2M) system, which includes not only a distributed system aimed at managing dialogues through the pipeline architecture, but also a slot sharing mechanism that allows the system to obtain information during a conversation in one domain and reuse it in another domain, in order to avoid redundant interactions and make the dialogue more efficient. Results show that the distributed architecture outperforms the centralized one by 21.51% and that the slot sharing mechanism improves the system performance both in the success rate and in the number of turns during the dialogue, demonstrating that it can prevent the agent from requesting redundant information.

Palavras-chave: Dialogue systems, Reinforcement learning, Transfer