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Add to EdgeAllWOZ: Towards Multilingual Task-Oriented Dialog Systems for All
Dec 15, 2021
A commonly observed problem of the state-of-the-art natural language technologies, such as Amazon Alexa and Apple Siri, is that their services do not extend to most developing countries' citizens due to language barriers. Such populations suffer due to the lack of available resources in their languages to build NLP products. This paper presents AllWOZ, a multilingual multi-domain task-oriented customer service dialog dataset covering eight languages: English, Mandarin, Korean, Vietnamese, Hindi, French, Portuguese, and Thai. Furthermore, we create a benchmark for our multilingual dataset by applying mT5 with meta-learning.
Improving Conversational Recommendation Systems' Quality with Context-Aware Item Meta Information
Dec 15, 2021
Conversational recommendation systems (CRS) engage with users by inferring user preferences from dialog history, providing accurate recommendations, and generating appropriate responses. Previous CRSs use knowledge graph (KG) based recommendation modules and integrate KG with language models for response generation. Although KG-based approaches prove effective, two issues remain to be solved. First, KG-based approaches ignore the information in the conversational context but only rely on entity relations and bag of words to recommend items. Second, it requires substantial engineering efforts to maintain KGs that model domain-specific relations, thus leading to less flexibility. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective architecture comprising a pre-trained language model (PLM) and an item metadata encoder. The encoder learns to map item metadata to embeddings that can reflect the semantic information in the dialog context. The PLM then consumes the semantic-aligned item embeddings together with dialog context to generate high-quality recommendations and responses. Instead of modeling entity relations with KGs, our model reduces engineering complexity by directly converting each item to an embedding. Experimental results on the benchmark dataset ReDial show that our model obtains state-of-the-art results on both recommendation and response generation tasks.