UNO-DST: Leveraging Unlabelled Data in Zero-Shot Dialogue State Tracking

Abstract

Previous zero-shot dialogue state tracking (DST) methods only apply transfer learning, but ignore unlabelled data in the target domain.We transform zero-shot DST into few-shot DST by utilising such unlabelled data via joint and self-training methods. Our method incorporates auxiliary tasks that generate slot types as inverse prompts for main tasks, creating slot values during joint training. Cycle consistency between these two tasks enables the generation and selection of quality samples in unknown target domains for subsequent fine-tuning. This approach also facilitates automatic label creation, thereby optimizing the training and fine-tuning of DST models. We demonstrate this method′s effectiveness on general language models in zero-shot scenarios, improving average joint goal accuracy by 8% across all domains in MultiWOZ.

Publication
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2024
Chuang Li
Chuang Li
ISEP Doctoral Student (Aug ‘20)

PhD Candidate August 2020 Intake

Min-Yen Kan
Min-Yen Kan
Associate Professor

WING lead; interests include Digital Libraries, Information Retrieval and Natural Language Processing.