Frontiers of Collaborative Task-oriented Dialogue Systems
Date:
In this talk, I introduce our exploration of collaborative dialogue models and our recent work on task-oriented dialogue systems. Task-oriented dialogue systems (TDSs), as an important branch of dialogue systems, have raised considerable interest due to their broad applicability. Recent end-to-end single-module TDSs have many attractive characteristics, e.g., global optimization and easy adaptation to new domains. However, we think it is impractical to use a single general agent to handle all complex cases in TDSs. For example, an agent that is specialized in booking a restaurant is unlikely to work well in scheduling meetings. Inspired by this intuition, we call for studies on a new series of collaborative task-oriented dialogue system (CTDS) frameworks, where multiple parallel and/or hierarchical agents work in a collaborative manner to achieve better performance than a single, general agent.