On Tracking Dialogue State by Inheriting Slot Values in Mentioned Slot Pools

Abstract

Dialogue state tracking (DST) is a component of the task oriented dialogue system. It is responsible for extracting and managing slots, where each slot represents a part of the information to accomplish a task, and slot value is updated recurrently in each dialogue turn. However, many DST models cannot update slot values appropriately. These models may repeatedly inherit wrong slot values extracted in previous turns, resulting in the fail of the entire DST task. They cannot update indirectly mentioned slots well, either. This study designed a model with a mentioned slot pool (MSP) to tackle the update problem. The MSP is a slot specific memory that records all mentioned slot values that may be inherited, and our model updates slot values according to the MSP and the dialogue context. Our model rejects inheriting the previous slot value when it predicates the value is wrong. Then, it extracts the slot value from the current dialogue context. As the contextual information accumulates, the new value is more likely to be correct. It also can track the indirectly mentioned slot by picking a value from the MSP. Experimental results showed our model reached state of the art DST performance on MultiWOZ datasets.