Transfer Learning for Unseen Slots in End-to-End Dialogue State Tracking

  • Chapter
  • First Online:
Increasing Naturalness and Flexibility in Spoken Dialogue Interaction

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Electrical Engineering ((LNEE,volume 714))

  • 442 Accesses

Abstract

This paper proposes a transfer learning algorithm for end-to-end dialogue state tracking (DST) to handle new slots with a small set of training data, which has not yet been discussed in the literature on conventional approaches. The goal of transfer learning is to improve DST performance for new slots by leveraging slot-independent parameters extracted from DST models for existing slots. An end-to-end DST model is composed of a spoken language understanding module and an update module. We assume that parameters of the update module can be slot-independent. To make the parameters slot-independent, a DST model for each existing slot is trained by sharing the parameters of the update module across all existing slots. The slot-independent parameters are transferred to a DST model for the new slot. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm achieves 82.5% accuracy on the DSTC2 dataset, outperforming a baseline algorithm by 1.8% when applied to a small set of training data. We also show its potential robustness for the network architecture of update modules.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Subscribe and save

Springer+ Basic
EUR 32.99 /Month
  • Get 10 units per month
  • Download Article/Chapter or Ebook
  • 1 Unit = 1 Article or 1 Chapter
  • Cancel anytime
Subscribe now

Buy Now

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 149.00
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 199.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free ship** worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book
USD 199.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free ship** worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. 1.

    https://nlp.stanford.edu/projects/glove/.

  2. 2.

    http://camdial.org/~mh521/dstc.

References

  1. Wang Z, Lemon O (2013) A simple and generic belief tracking mechanism for the dialog state tracking challenge: on the believability of observed information. In: Proceedings of the SIGDIAL 2013 conference, pp 423–432

    Google Scholar 

  2. Williams JD (2014) Web-style ranking and slu combination for dialog state tracking. In: Proceedings of the 15th annual meeting of the special interest group on discourse and dialogue (SIGDIAL), pp 282–291

    Google Scholar 

  3. Sun K, Chen L, Zhu S, Yu K (2014) A generalized rule based tracker for dialogue state tracking. In: 2014 IEEE spoken language technology workshop (SLT). IEEE, pp 330–335

    Google Scholar 

  4. Perez J, Liu F (2017) Dialog state tracking, a machine reading approach using memory network. In: Proceedings of the 15th conference of the European chapter of the association for computational linguistics, vol 1, pp 305–314

    Google Scholar 

  5. Rastogi A, Hakkani-Tür D, Heck L (2017) Scalable multi-domain dialogue state tracking. In: 2017 IEEE automatic speech recognition and understanding workshop (ASRU). IEEE, pp 561–568

    Google Scholar 

  6. Henderson M, Thomson B, Young S (2014) Word-based dialog state tracking with recurrent neural networks. In: Proceedings of the 15th annual meeting of the special interest group on discourse and dialogue (SIGDIAL), Philadelphia, PA, U.S.A., June 2014, Association for Computational Linguistics, pp 292–299

    Google Scholar 

  7. Henderson M, Thomson B, Young S (2014) Robust dialog state tracking using delexicalised recurrent neural networks and unsupervised adaptation. In: 2014 IEEE spoken language technology workshop (SLT). IEEE, pp 360–365

    Google Scholar 

  8. Mrkšić N, Séaghdha DÓ, Thomson B, Gasic M, Su P-H, Vandyke D, Wen T-H, Young S (2015) Multi-domain dialog state tracking using recurrent neural networks. In: Proceedings of the 53rd annual meeting of the association for computational linguistics and the 7th international joint conference on natural language processing, vol 2, pp 794–799

    Google Scholar 

  9. Lukas Z, Filip J (2015) Incremental lstm-based dialog state tracker. In: IEEE workshop on automatic speech recognition and understanding (ASRU). IEEE, pp 757–762

    Google Scholar 

  10. Yoshida T, Iwata K, Fujimura H, Akamine M (2018) Dialog state tracking for unseen values using an extended attention mechanism. In: Proceedings of the 8th international workshop on spoken dialogue systems (IWSDS)

    Google Scholar 

  11. Mrkšić N, Vulić I (2018) Fully statistical neural belief tracking. In: Proceedings of the 56th annual meeting of the association for computational linguistics, vol 2, pp 108–113

    Google Scholar 

  12. Xu P, Hu Q (2018) An end-to-end approach for handling unknown slot values in dialogue state tracking. In: Proceedings of the 56th annual meeting of the association for computational linguistics

    Google Scholar 

  13. Zhong V, **ong C, Socher R (2018) Global-locally self-attentive dialogue state tracker. In: Proceedings of the 56th annual meeting of the association for computational linguistics

    Google Scholar 

  14. Ramadan O, Budzianowski P, Gašić M (2018) Large-scale multi-domain belief tracking with knowledge sharing. In: Proceedings of the 56th annual meeting of the association for computational linguistics

    Google Scholar 

  15. Pan SJ, Yang Q (2010) A survey on transfer learning. IEEE Trans Knowl Data Eng 22(10):1345–1359

    Google Scholar 

  16. Dong W, Fang ZT (2015) Transfer learning for speech and language processing. In: 2015 Asia-Pacific Signal and information processing association annual summit and conference (APSIPA). IEEE, pp. 1225–1237

    Google Scholar 

  17. Passban P, Liu Q, Way A (2017) Translating low-resource languages by vocabulary adaptation from close counterparts. ACM Trans Asian Low-Resour Lang Inf Process (TALLIP) 16(4):29

    Google Scholar 

  18. Yu J, Qiu M, Jiang J, Huang J, Song S, Chu W, Chen H (2018) Modelling domain relationships for transfer learning on retrieval-based question answering systems in e-commerce. In: Proceedings of the 11th ACM international conference on web search and data mining. ACM, pp 682–690

    Google Scholar 

  19. Lee JY, Dernoncourt F, Szolovits P (2018) Transfer learning for named-entity recognition with neural networks. In: 11th international conference on language resources and evaluation (LREC)

    Google Scholar 

  20. Jeong M, Lee GG (2009) Multi-domain spoken language understanding with transfer learning. Speech Commun 51(5):412–424

    Google Scholar 

  21. Kim Y-B, Stratos K, Sarikaya R, Jeong M (2015) New transfer learning techniques for disparate label sets. In: Proceedings of the 53rd annual meeting of the association for computational linguistics and the 7th international joint conference on natural language processing, vol 1, pp 473–482

    Google Scholar 

  22. Bapna A, Tur G, Hakkani-Tur D, Heck L (2017) Towards zero-shot frame semantic parsing for domain scaling. In: Proceedings of the interspeech, pp 2476–2480

    Google Scholar 

  23. Henderson M, Thomson B, Williams J (2014) The second dialog state tracking challenge. In: 15th annual meeting of the special interest group on discourse and dialogue, vol 263

    Google Scholar 

  24. Tokui S, Oono K, Hido S, Clayton J (2015) Chainer: a next-generation open source framework for deep learning. In: Proceedings of workshop on machine learning systems (LearningSys) in the twenty-ninth annual conference on neural information processing systems (NIPS)

    Google Scholar 

  25. Pennington J, Socher R, Manning CD (2014) Glove: global vectors for word representation. In: Empirical methods in natural language processing (EMNLP), pp 1532–1543

    Google Scholar 

  26. Iyyer M, Manjunatha V, Boyd-Graber J, Daumé III H (2015) Deep unordered composition rivals syntactic methods for text classification. In: Proceedings of the 53rd annual meeting of the association for computational linguistics and the 7th international joint conference on natural language processing, vol 1, pp 1681–1691

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Kenji Iwata .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2021 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.

About this chapter

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this chapter

Iwata, K., Yoshida, T., Fujimura, H., Akamine, M. (2021). Transfer Learning for Unseen Slots in End-to-End Dialogue State Tracking. In: Marchi, E., Siniscalchi, S.M., Cumani, S., Salerno, V.M., Li, H. (eds) Increasing Naturalness and Flexibility in Spoken Dialogue Interaction. Lecture Notes in Electrical Engineering, vol 714. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-9323-9_5

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-9323-9_5

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Singapore

  • Print ISBN: 978-981-15-9322-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-981-15-9323-9

  • eBook Packages: EngineeringEngineering (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Navigation