# Zero-Shot Dialog Generation with Cross-Domain Latent Actions

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1805.04803 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.04803/

## Key facts

- Cited by 23 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 13 May 2018.

## Built on by (most cited first, 23 of 23)

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- [Domain Adaptation in Dialogue Systems using Transfer and Meta-Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.11146/) (2021)
- [Findings from Experiments of On-line Joint Reinforcement Learning of Semantic Parser and Dialogue Manager with real Users](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.13213/) (2021)
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## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper introduces zero-shot dialog generation (ZSDG), as a step towards neural dialog systems that can instantly generalize to new situations with minimal data. ZSDG enables an end-to-end generative dialog system to generalize to a new domain for which only a domain description is provided and no training dialogs are available. Then a novel learning framework, Action Matching, is proposed. This algorithm can learn a cross-domain embedding space that models the semantics of dialog responses which, in turn, lets a neural dialog generation model generalize to new domains. We evaluate our methods on a new synthetic dialog dataset, and an existing human-human dialog dataset. Results show that our method has superior performance in learning dialog models that rapidly adapt their behavior to new domains and suggests promising future research.
