# A Copy-Augmented Sequence-to-Sequence Architecture Gives Good Performance on Task-Oriented Dialogue

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1701.04024 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.04024/

## Key facts

- Cited by 14 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 15 Jan 2017.

## Built on by (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [Survey of Hallucination in Natural Language Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03629/) (2022)
- [Autoregressive Knowledge Distillation through Imitation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.07253/) (2020)
- [BiToD: A Bilingual Multi-Domain Dataset For Task-Oriented Dialogue Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.02787/) (2021)
- [Shades of BLEU, Flavours of Success: The Case of MultiWOZ](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05555/) (2021)
- [CHAI: A CHatbot AI for Task-Oriented Dialogue with Offline Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.08426/) (2022)
- [A Survey on Recent Advances and Challenges in Reinforcement Learning Methods for Task-Oriented Dialogue Policy Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.13675/) (2022)
- [Continual Learning for Task-oriented Dialogue System with Iterative Network Pruning, Expanding and Masking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.08173/) (2021)
- [Context-Aware Language Modeling for Goal-Oriented Dialogue Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.10198/) (2022)
- [Modeling Text-visual Mutual Dependency for Multi-modal Dialog Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.14445/) (2021)
- [Localize, Retrieve and Fuse: A Generalized Framework for Free-Form Question Answering over Tables](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.11049/) (2023)
- [A Template-guided Hybrid Pointer Network for Knowledge-basedTask-oriented Dialogue Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05830/) (2021)
- [DIALIGHT: Lightweight Multilingual Development and Evaluation of Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.02208/) (2024)
- [Reranking Overgenerated Responses for End-to-End Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.03648/) (2022)
- [Many Hands Make Light Work: Task-Oriented Dialogue System with Module-Based Mixture-of-Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.09744/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Task-oriented dialogue focuses on conversational agents that participate in user-initiated dialogues on domain-specific topics. In contrast to chatbots, which simply seek to sustain open-ended meaningful discourse, existing task-oriented agents usually explicitly model user intent and belief states. This paper examines bypassing such an explicit representation by depending on a latent neural embedding of state and learning selective attention to dialogue history together with copying to incorporate relevant prior context. We complement recent work by showing the effectiveness of simple sequence-to-sequence neural architectures with a copy mechanism. Our model outperforms more complex memory-augmented models by 7% in per-response generation and is on par with the current state-of-the-art on DSTC2.