# Key-Value Retrieval Networks for Task-Oriented Dialogue

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.05414 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.05414/

## Key facts

- Cited by 138 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 15 May 2017.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 138)

- [UnifiedSKG: Unifying and Multi-Tasking Structured Knowledge Grounding with Text-to-Text Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.05966/) (2022)
- [A Survey on Recent Advances in LLM-Based Multi-turn Dialogue Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.18013/) (2024)
- [Multi-Task Pre-Training for Plug-and-Play Task-Oriented Dialogue System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.14739/) (2021)
- [TableLlama: Towards Open Large Generalist Models for Tables](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.09206/) (2023)
- [Recent Advances in Deep Learning Based Dialogue Systems: A Systematic Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.04387/) (2021)
- [KLUE: Korean Language Understanding Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.09680/) (2021)
- [GALAXY: A Generative Pre-trained Model for Task-Oriented Dialog with Semi-Supervised Learning and Explicit Policy Injection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14592/) (2021)
- [QA Dataset Explosion: A Taxonomy of NLP Resources for Question Answering and Reading Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.12708/) (2021)
- [Action-Based Conversations Dataset: A Corpus for Building More In-Depth Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00783/) (2021)
- [SpokenWOZ: A Large-Scale Speech-Text Benchmark for Spoken Task-Oriented Dialogue Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13040/) (2023)
- [Latent Diffusion Energy-Based Model for Interpretable Text Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.05895/) (2022)
- [Few-Shot Bot: Prompt-Based Learning for Dialogue Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.08118/) (2021)
- [BiToD: A Bilingual Multi-Domain Dataset For Task-Oriented Dialogue Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.02787/) (2021)
- [Controllable Dialogue Simulation with In-Context Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.04185/) (2022)
- [InstructDial: Improving Zero and Few-shot Generalization in Dialogue through Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.12673/) (2022)
- [SPACE-3: Unified Dialog Model Pre-training for Task-Oriented Dialog Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.06664/) (2022)
- [AuGPT: Auxiliary Tasks and Data Augmentation for End-To-End Dialogue with Pre-Trained Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05126/) (2021)
- [GlobalWoZ: Globalizing MultiWoZ to Develop Multilingual Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07679/) (2021)
- [Ask an Expert: Leveraging Language Models to Improve Strategic Reasoning in Goal-Oriented Dialogue Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.17878/) (2023)
- [Improving Unsupervised Dialogue Topic Segmentation with Utterance-Pair Coherence Scoring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.06719/) (2021)
- [StructLM: Towards Building Generalist Models for Structured Knowledge Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.16671/) (2024)
- [HybriDialogue: An Information-Seeking Dialogue Dataset Grounded on Tabular and Textual Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.13243/) (2022)
- [Neuro-Symbolic Procedural Planning with Commonsense Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.02928/) (2022)
- [SPACE-2: Tree-Structured Semi-Supervised Contrastive Pre-training for Task-Oriented Dialog Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.06638/) (2022)
- [Building a Role Specified Open-Domain Dialogue System Leveraging Large-Scale Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.00176/) (2022)
- [Uncovering the Potential of ChatGPT for Discourse Analysis in Dialogue: An Empirical Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.08391/) (2023)
- [ConvLab-3: A Flexible Dialogue System Toolkit Based on a Unified Data Format](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.17148/) (2022)
- [DialogStudio: Towards Richest and Most Diverse Unified Dataset Collection for Conversational AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.10172/) (2023)
- [Structural Pre-training for Dialogue Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.10956/) (2021)
- [End-to-End Learning of Flowchart Grounded Task-Oriented Dialogs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07263/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Neural task-oriented dialogue systems often struggle to smoothly interface with a knowledge base. In this work, we seek to address this problem by proposing a new neural dialogue agent that is able to effectively sustain grounded, multi-domain discourse through a novel key-value retrieval mechanism. The model is end-to-end differentiable and does not need to explicitly model dialogue state or belief trackers. We also release a new dataset of 3,031 dialogues that are grounded through underlying knowledge bases and span three distinct tasks in the in-car personal assistant space: calendar scheduling, weather information retrieval, and point-of-interest navigation. Our architecture is simultaneously trained on data from all domains and significantly outperforms a competitive rule-based system and other existing neural dialogue architectures on the provided domains according to both automatic and human evaluation metrics.
