Creating high-quality annotated data for task-oriented dialog (ToD) is known to be notoriously difficult, and the challenges are amplified when the goal is to create equitable, culturally adapted, and large-scale ToD datasets for multiple languages. Therefore, the current datasets are still very scarce and suffer from limitations such as translation-based non-native dialogs with translation artefacts, small scale, or lack of cultural adaptation, among others. In this work, we first take stock of the current landscape of multilingual ToD datasets, offering a systematic overview of their properties and limitations. Aiming to reduce all the detected limitations, we then introduce Multi3WOZ, a novel multilingual, multi-domain, multi-parallel ToD dataset. It is large-scale and offers culturally adapted dialogs in 4 languages to enable training and evaluation of multilingual and cross-lingual ToD systems. We describe a complex bottom-up data collection process that yielded the final dataset, and offer the first sets of baseline scores across different ToD-related tasks for future reference, also highlighting its challenging nature.
A commonly observed problem of the state-of-the-art natural language technologies, such as Amazon Alexa and Apple Siri, is that their services do not extend to most developing countries' citizens due to language barriers. Such populations suffer due to the lack of available resources in their languages to build NLP products. This paper presents AllWOZ, a multilingual multi-domain task-oriented customer service dialog dataset covering eight languages: English, Mandarin, Korean, Vietnamese, Hindi, French, Portuguese, and Thai. Furthermore, we create a benchmark for our multilingual dataset by ap…
Overview of Robust and Multilingual Automatic Evaluation Metrics for Open-Domain Dialogue Systems at DSTC 11 Track 4
Universidad Politécnica de Madrid（马德里理工大学）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；Tencent AI Lab（腾讯人工智能实验室）；University of Southern California（南加州大学）；New York University（纽约大学）；Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）
University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）；University of Würzburg（维尔茨堡大学）；Mila - Quebec AI Institute（米拉-魁北克人工智能研究所）；McGill University（麦吉尔大学）；PolyAI Limited（PolyAI有限公司）
In task-oriented dialogue (ToD), a user holds a conversation with an artificial agent to complete a concrete task. Although this technology represents one of the central objectives of AI and has been the focus of ever more intense research and development efforts, it is currently limited to a few narrow domains (e.g., food ordering, ticket booking) and a handful of languages (e.g., English, Chinese). This work provides an extensive overview of existing methods and resources in multilingual ToD as an entry point to this exciting and emerging field. We find that the most critical factor preventi…
LTCI, Telecom Paris, Institut Polytechnique de Paris（巴黎综合理工学院电信巴黎分校LTCI）；IBM GBS France（IBM GBS法国）
Spoken dialog systems need to be able to handle both multiple languages and multilinguality inside a conversation (\textit{e.g} in case of code-switching). In this work, we introduce new pretraining losses tailored to learn multilingual spoken dialog representations. The goal of these losses is to expose the model to code-switched language. To scale up training, we automatically build a pretraining corpus composed of multilingual conversations in five different languages (French, Italian, English, German and Spanish) from \texttt{OpenSubtitles}, a huge multilingual corpus composed of 24.3G tok…
DAMO Academy, Alibaba Group（阿里巴巴集团达摩院）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；University of Wisconsin-Madison（威斯康星大学麦迪逊分校）
Much recent progress in task-oriented dialogue (ToD) systems has been driven by available annotation data across multiple domains for training. Over the last few years, there has been a move towards data curation for multilingual ToD systems that are applicable to serve people speaking different languages. However, existing multilingual ToD datasets either have a limited coverage of languages due to the high cost of data curation, or ignore the fact that dialogue entities barely exist in countries speaking these languages. To tackle these limitations, we introduce a novel data curation method …
Center for Artificial Intelligence Research (CAiRE)（人工智能研究中心（CAiRE））；The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）
Personalized dialogue systems are an essential step toward better human-machine interaction. Existing personalized dialogue agents rely on properly designed conversational datasets, which are mostly monolingual (e.g., English), which greatly limits the usage of conversational agents in other languages. In this paper, we propose a multi-lingual extension of Persona-Chat, namely XPersona. Our dataset includes persona conversations in six different languages other than English for building and evaluating multilingual personalized agents. We experiment with both multilingual and cross-lingual trai…
I run as fast as a rabbit, can you? A Multilingual Simile Dialogue Dataset
School of Information Science, Beijing Language and Culture University（北京语言大学信息科学学院）；School of Computer Science, Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学计算机科学学院）
Overview of Dialog System Evaluation Track: Dimensionality, Language, Culture and Safety at DSTC 12
INESC-ID；Instituto Superior Técnico - University of Lisbon（理工学院 - 里斯本大学）；Department of Technology, Operations, and Statistics, New York University（技术、运营与统计系，纽约大学）；Speech Technology and Machine Learning Group - Universidad Politécnica de Madrid（语音技术与机器学习小组 - 马德里理工大学）；Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）
Robust state tracking for task-oriented dialogue systems currently remains restricted to a few popular languages. This paper shows that given a large-scale dialogue data set in one language, we can automatically produce an effective semantic parser for other languages using machine translation. We propose automatic translation of dialogue datasets with alignment to ensure faithful translation of slot values and eliminate costly human supervision used in previous benchmarks. We also propose a new contextual semantic parsing model, which encodes the formal slots and values, and only the last age…
While the English virtual assistants have achieved exciting performance with an enormous amount of training resources, the needs of non-English-speakers have not been satisfied well. Up to Dec 2021, Alexa, one of the most popular smart speakers around the world, is able to support 9 different languages [1], while there are thousands of languages in the world, 91 of which are spoken by more than 10 million people according to statistics published in 2019 [2]. However, training a virtual assistant in other languages than English is often more difficult, especially for those low-resource language…
Center for Artificial Intelligence Research (CAiRE)（人工智能研究中心（CAiRE））；The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）
Despite the surging demands for multilingual task-oriented dialog systems (e.g., Alexa, Google Home), there has been less research done in multilingual or cross-lingual scenarios. Hence, we propose a zero-shot adaptation of task-oriented dialogue system to low-resource languages. To tackle this challenge, we first use a set of very few parallel word pairs to refine the aligned cross-lingual word-level representations. We then employ a latent variable model to cope with the variance of similar sentences across different languages, which is induced by imperfect cross-lingual alignments and inher…
Online conversations include more than just text. Increasingly, image-based responses such as memes and animated gifs serve as culturally recognized and often humorous responses in conversation. However, while NLP has broadened to multimodal models, conversational dialog systems have largely focused only on generating text replies. Here, we introduce a new dataset of 1.56M text-gif conversation turns and introduce a new multimodal conversational model Pepe the King Prawn for selecting gif-based replies. We demonstrate that our model produces relevant and high-quality gif responses and, in a la…
Most of the current task-oriented dialogue systems (ToD), despite having interesting results, are designed for a handful of languages like Chinese and English. Therefore, their performance in low-resource languages is still a significant problem due to the absence of a standard dataset and evaluation policy. To address this problem, we proposed ViWOZ, a fully-annotated Vietnamese task-oriented dialogue dataset. ViWOZ is the first multi-turn, multi-domain tasked oriented dataset in Vietnamese, a low-resource language. The dataset consists of a total of 5,000 dialogues, including 60,946 fully an…
Building dialogue generation systems in a zero-shot scenario remains a huge challenge, since the typical zero-shot approaches in dialogue generation rely heavily on large-scale pre-trained language generation models such as GPT-3 and T5. The research on zero-shot dialogue generation without cumbersome language models is limited due to lacking corresponding parallel dialogue corpora. In this paper, we propose a simple but effective Multilingual learning framework for Zero-shot Dialogue Generation (dubbed as MulZDG) that can effectively transfer knowledge from an English corpus with large-scale …
Can MLLMs Generalize to Multi-Party dialog? Exploring Multilingual Response Generation in Complex Scenarios
School of Computer Science and Engineering, Northwestern Polytechnical University（计算机科学与工程学院，西北工业大学）；School of Computer Science and Technology, Xidian University（计算机科学与技术学院，西安电子科技大学）；School of Artificial Intelligence and Big Data, Henan University of Technology（人工智能与大数据学院，河南工业大学）
University of Helsinki（赫尔辛基大学）；École Normale Supérieure（巴黎高等师范学院）
We present a method for extracting a multilingual sentiment annotated dialog data set from Fallout New Vegas. The game developers have preannotated every line of dialog in the game in one of the 8 different sentiments: \textit{anger, disgust, fear, happy, neutral, pained, sad } and \textit{surprised}. The game has been translated into English, Spanish, German, French and Italian. We conduct experiments on multilingual, multilabel sentiment analysis on the extracted data set using multilingual BERT, XLMRoBERTa and language specific BERT models. In our experiments, multilingual BERT outperformed…
Interactions, LLC；Murray Hill, NJ, USA（美国新泽西州默里希尔（注：此处为地址，非机构，按要求不应提取。正确机构仅为Interactions, LLC））
With the resurgence of chat-based dialog systems in consumer and enterprise applications, there has been much success in developing data-driven and rule-based natural language models to understand human intent. Since these models require large amounts of data and in-domain knowledge, expanding an equivalent service into new markets is disrupted by language barriers that inhibit dialog automation. This paper presents a user study to evaluate the utility of out-of-the-box machine translation technology to (1) rapidly bootstrap multilingual spoken dialog systems and (2) enable existing human anal…
Recent progress in task-oriented neural dialogue systems is largely focused on a handful of languages, as annotation of training data is tedious and expensive. Machine translation has been used to make systems multilingual, but this can introduce a pipeline of errors. Another promising solution is using cross-lingual transfer learning through pretrained multilingual models. Existing methods train multilingual models with additional code-mixed task data or refine the cross-lingual representations through parallel ontologies. In this work, we enhance the transfer learning process by intermediate…
WorldBench: Culturally Grounded Benchmark for Multilingual Agents
University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学）；School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学信息学院）；School of Artificial Intelligence, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学人工智能学院）
xDial-Eval: A Multilingual Open-Domain Dialogue Evaluation Benchmark
National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；Universidad Politécnica de Madrid（马德里理工大学）；Tencent AI Lab（腾讯人工智能实验室）；Shenzhen Research Institute of Big Data（深圳大数据研究院）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen（香港中文大学（深圳））
Dial HEALTHDIAL for Advice: A Multilingual and Multi-Parallel Spoken Dialogue Dataset for Knowledge-Grounded Information Seeking
Language Technology Lab, University of Cambridge（剑桥大学语言技术实验室）；School of Computation, Information and Technology, Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑技术大学计算、信息与技术学院）；Independent Researcher（独立研究员）
DialogPII: A multilingual dataset of synthetic dialog transcripts to detect personal information
German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI)（德国人工智能研究中心（DFKI））；Technical University Berlin（柏林技术大学）；Berlin Institute of Health (BIH)（柏林健康研究所（BIH））；Tilburg University（蒂尔堡大学）；Universidad de Buenos Aires（布宜诺斯艾利斯大学）；Independent Researcher（独立研究者）；Bundesinstitut für Risikobewertung (BfR)（风险评估联邦机构（BfR））
