Introduction to Task-Oriented Dialog Systems

What are Task-Oriented Dialog Systems?

Types of Task-Oriented Dialog Systems

• Pipeline-based
• End-to-end
• Joint systems

Characteristics of TOD systems

1. Domain, intent

2. Slot-value pairs

3. Data usually sourced via crowd-sourcing

4. Manual annotation a necessity

5. Retrieval-based and generative models

Pipeline-based systems

1. Usually consist of four components: NLU/ASR, DST, Policy, NLG

2. Traditional TOD systems were pipeline-based; recent move is towards end-to-end

End-to-end systems

Joint models

Evaluation of TOD systems

1. Metrics from other problems like machine translation commonly used

2. Component-wise vs full evaluation

3. Multiple responses?

4. Automatic vs human evaluation

Research areas

1. Zero-shot/few-shot learning

2. Transformers/pre-trained language models

3. Multi-response dialog systems

4. Multilinguility

5. Evaluation metrics

6. Dataset development

Ethical considerations

1. Data sourcing

2. Inherent bias

3. Privacy

4. Safety