# Flexibly-Structured Model for Task-Oriented Dialogues

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1908.02402 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.02402/

## Key facts

- Cited by 10 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 6 Aug 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [Multi-Task Pre-Training for Plug-and-Play Task-Oriented Dialogue System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.14739/) (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)
- [SPACE-3: Unified Dialog Model Pre-training for Task-Oriented Dialog Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.06664/) (2022)
- [End-to-end Task-oriented Dialogue: A Survey of Tasks, Methods, and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.09008/) (2023)
- [Variational Latent-State GPT for Semi-Supervised Task-Oriented Dialog Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.04314/) (2021)
- [A Challenge on Semi-Supervised and Reinforced Task-Oriented Dialog Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.02657/) (2022)
- [Building Markovian Generative Architectures over Pretrained LM Backbones for Efficient Task-Oriented Dialog Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06452/) (2022)
- [Information Extraction and Human-Robot Dialogue towards Real-life Tasks: A Baseline Study with the MobileCS Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.13464/) (2022)
- [Dual Hierarchical Dialogue Policy Learning for Legal Inquisitive Conversational Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.14057/) (2026)
- [ESAinsTOD: A Unified End-to-End Schema-Aware Instruction-Tuning Framework for Task-Oriented Dialog Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.09691/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper proposes a novel end-to-end architecture for task-oriented dialogue systems. It is based on a simple and practical yet very effective sequence-to-sequence approach, where language understanding and state tracking tasks are modeled jointly with a structured copy-augmented sequential decoder and a multi-label decoder for each slot. The policy engine and language generation tasks are modeled jointly following that. The copy-augmented sequential decoder deals with new or unknown values in the conversation, while the multi-label decoder combined with the sequential decoder ensures the explicit assignment of values to slots. On the generation part, slot binary classifiers are used to improve performance. This architecture is scalable to real-world scenarios and is shown through an empirical evaluation to achieve state-of-the-art performance on both the Cambridge Restaurant dataset and the Stanford in-car assistant datasetfootnoteThe code is available at urlhttps://github.com/uber-research/FSDM