Conversational Semantic Parsing for Dialog State Tracking

EMNLP 2020 · Jianpeng Cheng, Devang Agrawal, Hector Martinez Alonso, Shruti Bhargava, Joris Driesen, Federico Flego, Shaona Ghosh, Dain Kaplan, Dimitri Kartsaklis, Lin Li, Dhivya Piraviperumal, Jason D Williams, Hong Yu, Diarmuid O Seaghdha, Anders Johannsen ·

We consider a new perspective on dialog state tracking (DST), the task of estimating a user's goal through the course of a dialog. By formulating DST as a semantic parsing task over hierarchical representations, we can incorporate semantic compositionality, cross-domain knowledge sharing and co-reference. We present TreeDST, a dataset of 27k conversations annotated with tree-structured dialog states and system acts. We describe an encoder-decoder framework for DST with hierarchical representations, which leads to 20% improvement over state-of-the-art DST approaches that operate on a flat meaning space of slot-value pairs.