TOD-BERT: Pre-trained Natural Language Understanding For Task-oriented Dialogue

Chien-sheng Wu, Steven Hoi, Richard Socher, Caiming Xiong. Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP) 2020 – 79 citations

[Paper]    
Language Modeling Model Architecture Few-Shot Applications Masked Language Model Reinforcement Learning Pre-Training BERT Training Techniques

The underlying difference of linguistic patterns between general text and task-oriented dialogue makes existing pre-trained language models less useful in practice. In this work, we unify nine human-human and multi-turn task-oriented dialogue datasets for language modeling. To better model dialogue behavior during pre-training, we incorporate user and system tokens into the masked language modeling. We propose a contrastive objective function to simulate the response selection task. Our pre-trained task-oriented dialogue BERT (TOD-BERT) outperforms strong baselines like BERT on four downstream task-oriented dialogue applications, including intention recognition, dialogue state tracking, dialogue act prediction, and response selection. We also show that TOD-BERT has a stronger few-shot ability that can mitigate the data scarcity problem for task-oriented dialogue.

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