A probabilistic end-to-end task-oriented dialog model with latent belief states towards semi-supervised learning

Abstract

Structured belief states are crucial for user goal tracking and database query in task-oriented dialog systems. However, training belief trackers often requires expensive turn-level annotations of every user utterance. In this paper we aim at alleviating the reliance on belief state labels in building end-to-end dialog systems, by leveraging unlabeled dialog data towards semi-supervised learning. We propose a probabilistic dialog model, called the LAtent BElief State (LABES) model, where belief states are represented as discrete latent variables and jointly modeled with system responses given user inputs. Such latent variable modeling enables us to develop semi-supervised learning under the principled variational learning framework. Furthermore, we introduce LABES-S2S, which is a copy-augmented Seq2Seq model instantiation of LABES. In supervised experiments, LABESS2S obtains strong results on three benchmark datasets of different scales. In utilizing unlabeled dialog data, semi-supervised LABESS2S significantly outperforms both supervised-only and semi-supervised baselines. Remarkably, we can reduce the annotation demands to 50% without performance loss on MultiWOZ.