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arXiv · 2404.15219

Unsupervised End-to-End Task-Oriented Dialogue with LLMs: The Power of the Noisy Channel

Brendan King·Jeffrey Flanigan
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Abstract

Training task-oriented dialogue systems typically requires turn-level annotations for interacting with their APIs: e.g. a dialogue state and the system actions taken at each step. These annotations can be costly to produce, error-prone, and require both domain and annotation expertise. With advances in LLMs, we hypothesize that unlabeled data and a schema definition are sufficient for building a working task-oriented dialogue system, completely unsupervised. We consider a novel unsupervised setting of only (1) a well-defined API schema (2) a set of unlabeled dialogues between a user and agent. We propose an innovative approach using expectation-maximization (EM) that infers turn-level annotations as latent variables using a noisy channel model to build an end-to-end dialogue agent. Evaluating our approach on the MultiWOZ benchmark, our method more than doubles the dialogue success rate of a strong GPT-3.5 baseline.

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Brendan King, Jeffrey Flanigan. 2024-04-23. Unsupervised End-to-End Task-Oriented Dialogue with LLMs: The Power of the Noisy Channel. https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.15219

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