# Beyond Domain APIs: Task-oriented Conversational Modeling with Unstructured Knowledge Access Track in DSTC9

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.09276 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.09276/

## Key facts

- Cited by 10 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 7 of its 15 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Jan 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [DialoGPT: Large-Scale Generative Pre-training for Conversational Response Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.00536/) (2019)
- [Unified Language Model Pre-training for Natural Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.03197/) (2019)
- [Passage Re-ranking with BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.04085/) (2019)
- [Wizard of Wikipedia: Knowledge-Powered Conversational agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.01241/) (2018)
- [Beyond Domain APIs: Task-oriented Conversational Modeling with Unstructured Knowledge Access](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.03533/) (2020)
- [Are Neural Open-Domain Dialog Systems Robust to Speech Recognition Errors in the Dialog History? An Empirical Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.07683/) (2020)

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

- ["How Robust r u?": Evaluating Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems on Spoken Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.13489/) (2021)
- [Adapting Document-Grounded Dialog Systems to Spoken Conversations using Data Augmentation and a Noisy Channel Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.08844/) (2021)
- [Task-oriented Document-Grounded Dialog Systems by HLTPR@RWTH for DSTC9 and DSTC10](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07101/) (2023)
- [End-to-End Task-Oriented Dialog Modeling with Semi-Structured Knowledge Management](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.11796/) (2021)
- [Towards Zero and Few-shot Knowledge-seeking Turn Detection in Task-orientated Dialogue Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.08820/) (2021)
- [GKS: Graph-based Knowledge Selector for Task-oriented Dialog System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.03719/) (2021)
- [Towards Generalized Models for Task-oriented Dialogue Modeling on Spoken Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.04045/) (2022)
- [Robust Unstructured Knowledge Access in Conversational Dialogue with ASR Errors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.03990/) (2022)
- [Unstructured Text Enhanced Open-domain Dialogue System: A Systematic Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.09166/) (2024)
- [Suffix Retrieval-Augmented Language Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.03053/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Most prior work on task-oriented dialogue systems are restricted to a limited coverage of domain APIs, while users oftentimes have domain related requests that are not covered by the APIs. This challenge track aims to expand the coverage of task-oriented dialogue systems by incorporating external unstructured knowledge sources. We define three tasks: knowledge-seeking turn detection, knowledge selection, and knowledge-grounded response generation. We introduce the data sets and the neural baseline models for three tasks. The challenge track received a total of 105 entries from 24 participating teams. In the evaluation results, the ensemble methods with different large-scale pretrained language models achieved high performances with improved knowledge selection capability and better generalization into unseen data.