Traditionally, each component of task-oriented dialogue systems is trained independently with different supervision.

Task-oriented dialogue is often decomposed into three tasks: understanding user input, deciding actions, and generating a response. While such decomposition might suggest a dedicated model for each sub-task, we find a simple, unified approach leads to state-of-the-art performance on the MultiWOZ dataset. SimpleTOD is a simple approach to task-oriented dialogue that uses a single, causal language model trained on all sub-tasks recast as a single sequence prediction problem. This allows SimpleTOD to fully leverage transfer learning from pre-trained, open domain, causal language models such as GPT-2. SimpleTOD improves over the prior state-of-the-art in joint goal accuracy for dialogue state tracking, and our analysis reveals robustness to noisy annotations in this setting. SimpleTOD also improves the main metrics used to evaluate action decisions and response generation in an end-to-end setting: inform rate by 8.1 points, success rate by 9.7 points, and combined score by 7.2 points.

Task-oriented dialogue is often decomposed into three tasks: understanding user input, deciding actions, and generating a response.

Training conversational question-answering (QA) systems requires a substantial amount of in-domain data, which is often scarce in practice. A common solution to this challenge is to generate synthetic data. Traditional methods typically follow a top-down approach, where a large language model (LLM) generates multi-turn dialogues from a broad prompt. Although this method produces coherent conversations, it offers limited fine-grained control over the content and is susceptible to hallucinations. We introduce a bottom-up conversation synthesis approach, where QA pairs are generated first and then combined into a coherent dialogue. This method offers greater control and precision by dividing the process into two distinct steps, allowing refined instructions and validations to be handled separately. Additionally, this structure allows the use of non-local models in stages that do not involve proprietary knowledge, enhancing the overall quality of the generated data. Both human and automated evaluations demonstrate that our approach produces more realistic and higher-quality dialogues compared to top-down methods.

Data scarcity is one of the main problems when it comes to real-world applications of transformer-based models. This is especially evident for task-oriented dialogue (TOD) systems, which require specialized datasets, that are usually not readily available. This can hinder companies from adding TOD systems to their services. This study therefore investigates a novel approach to sourcing annotated dialogues from existing German monologue material. Focusing on a real-world example, we investigate whether these monologues can be transformed into dialogue formats suitable for training TOD systems. We show the approach with the concrete example of a company specializing in travel bookings via e-mail. We fine-tune state-of-the-art Large Language Models for the task of rewriting e-mails as dialogues and annotating them. To ensure the quality and validity of the generated data, we employ crowd workers to evaluate the dialogues across multiple criteria and to provide gold-standard annotations for the test dataset. We further evaluate the usefulness of the dialogues for training TOD systems. Our evaluation shows that the dialogues and annotations are of high quality and can serve as a valuable starting point for training TOD systems. Finally, we make the annotated dataset publicly available to foster future research.

Summary and Contributions: The authors propose SimpleTOD, which can replace modular task-oriented dialogue models to unified causal language model in an end-2-end manner. There are three sub-tasks in the task-oriented dialogue. They are dialogue state tracking, action prediction, and response generation. SimpleTOD treats all three sub-tasks as sequence generation. Whole up to dialogue context C_t is used as the first input to the model, and the model generates dialogue state B_t at turn t.

All reviewers find this work quite strong both in terms of approach and results, and reviewers applaud that the work has proved robustly reproducible. One important point is that several contemporaneous papers share some commonalities with this submission. We agree that they were published less than a month before the deadline and should therefore be considered contemporaneous; however it would have been much better scientific practice to include the discussion of these works in the submission, if the authors were aware of them -- regardless on when the authors put their initial submission on arxiv. The discussion that situates the submission in the context of these other works in the authors response is enlightening and interesting, and should definitely be in the final version. Conditioned on this being the case, we are happy to accept the paper.

Training task-oriented dialogue systems is both costly and time-consuming, due to the need for high-quality datasets encompassing diverse intents. Traditional methods depend on extensive human annotation, while recent advancements leverage large language models (LLMs) to generate synthetic data. However, these approaches often require custom prompts or code, limiting accessibility for non-technical users. We introduce GraphTOD, an end-to-end framework that simplifies the generation of task-oriented dialogues. Users can create dialogues by specifying transition graphs in JSON format. Our evaluation demonstrates that GraphTOD generates high-quality dialogues across various domains, significantly lowering the cost and complexity of dataset creation.

Task-oriented dialogue is often decomposed into three tasks: understanding user input, deciding actions, and generating a response. While such decomposition might suggest a dedicated model for each sub-task, we find a simple, unified approach leads to state-of-the-art performance on the MultiWOZ dataset. SimpleTOD is a simple approach to task-oriented dialogue that uses a single, causal language model trained on all sub-tasks recast as a single sequence prediction problem. This allows SimpleTOD to fully leverage transfer learning from pre-trained, open domain, causal language models such as GPT-2. SimpleTOD improves over the prior state-of-the-art in joint goal accuracy for dialogue state tracking, and our analysis reveals robustness to noisy annotations in this setting.

This report characterized the suitability of existing datasets for devising new Machine Learning models, decision making methods, and analysis algorithms to improve Collaborative Problem Solving and then enumerated requirements for future datasets to be devised. Problem solving was assumed to be performed in teams of about three, four members, which talked to each other. A dataset consists of the speech recordings of such teams. The characterization methodology was based on metrics that capture cognitive, social, and emotional activities and situations. The report presented the analysis of a large group of datasets developed for Spoken Language Understanding, a research area with some similarity to Collaborative Problem Solving.