# Cross-Lingual Dialogue Dataset Creation via Outline-Based Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.13405 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.13405/

## Key facts

- Cited by 23 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 45 of its 73 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 31 Jan 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 45)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Unsupervised Cross-lingual Representation Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02116/) (2019)
- [The Curious Case of Neural Text Degeneration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09751/) (2019)
- [mT5: A massively multilingual pre-trained text-to-text transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11934/) (2020)
- [Multilingual Denoising Pre-training for Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.08210/) (2020)
- [XTREME: A Massively Multilingual Multi-task Benchmark for Evaluating Cross-lingual Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.11080/) (2020)
- [Language-agnostic BERT Sentence Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.01852/) (2020)
- [TyDi QA: A Benchmark for Information-Seeking Question Answering in Typologically Diverse Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.05002/) (2020)
- [Towards Scalable Multi-domain Conversational Agents: The Schema-Guided Dialogue Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.05855/) (2019)
- [An Evaluation Dataset for Intent Classification and Out-of-Scope Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.02027/) (2019)
- [XCOPA: A Multilingual Dataset for Causal Commonsense Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00333/) (2020)
- [MultiWOZ 2.2 : A Dialogue Dataset with Additional Annotation Corrections and State Tracking Baselines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.12720/) (2020)
- [Marian: Fast Neural Machine Translation in C++](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.00344/) (2018)
- [Multilingual Universal Sentence Encoder for Semantic Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.04307/) (2019)
- [Visually Grounded Reasoning across Languages and Cultures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.13238/) (2021)
- [Benchmarking Natural Language Understanding Services for building Conversational Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.05566/) (2019)
- [MTOP: A Comprehensive Multilingual Task-Oriented Semantic Parsing Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.09335/) (2020)
- [Cross-Lingual Transfer Learning for Multilingual Task Oriented Dialog](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.13327/) (2018)
- [Hello, It's GPT-2 -- How Can I Help You? Towards the Use of Pretrained Language Models for Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.05774/) (2019)
- [Translation Artifacts in Cross-lingual Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04721/) (2020)
- [End-to-End Slot Alignment and Recognition for Cross-Lingual NLU](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.14353/) (2020)
- [Building a Conversational Agent Overnight with Dialogue Self-Play](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04871/) (2018)
- [CrossWOZ: A Large-Scale Chinese Cross-Domain Task-Oriented Dialogue Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.11893/) (2020)
- [BiToD: A Bilingual Multi-Domain Dataset For Task-Oriented Dialogue Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.02787/) (2021)
- [From Masked Language Modeling to Translation: Non-English Auxiliary Tasks Improve Zero-shot Spoken Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.07316/) (2021)
- [Attention-Informed Mixed-Language Training for Zero-shot Cross-lingual Task-oriented Dialogue Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.09273/) (2019)
- [RiSAWOZ: A Large-Scale Multi-Domain Wizard-of-Oz Dataset with Rich Semantic Annotations for Task-Oriented Dialogue Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.08738/) (2020)
- [Translationese in Machine Translation Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.09833/) (2019)
- [BERT-DST: Scalable End-to-End Dialogue State Tracking with Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.03040/) (2019)
- [GlobalWoZ: Globalizing MultiWoZ to Develop Multilingual Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07679/) (2021)

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

- [MathDial: A Dialogue Tutoring Dataset with Rich Pedagogical Properties Grounded in Math Reasoning Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14536/) (2023)
- [NusaCrowd: Open Source Initiative for Indonesian NLP Resources](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09648/) (2022)
- [XTREME-UP: A User-Centric Scarce-Data Benchmark for Under-Represented Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11938/) (2023)
- [Are Multilingual LLMs Culturally-Diverse Reasoners? An Investigation into Multicultural Proverbs and Sayings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.08591/) (2023)
- [Square One Bias in NLP: Towards a Multi-Dimensional Exploration of the Research Manifold](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.09755/) (2022)
- [Culturally Aware and Adapted NLP: A Taxonomy and a Survey of the State of the Art](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.03930/) (2024)
- ["Do you follow me?": A Survey of Recent Approaches in Dialogue State Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.14627/) (2022)
- [Multi3WOZ: A Multilingual, Multi-Domain, Multi-Parallel Dataset for Training and Evaluating Culturally Adapted Task-Oriented Dialog Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.14031/) (2023)
- [MULTI3NLU++: A Multilingual, Multi-Intent, Multi-Domain Dataset for Natural Language Understanding in Task-Oriented Dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10455/) (2022)
- [Extrinsic Evaluation of Machine Translation Metrics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10297/) (2022)
- [Efficiently Aligned Cross-Lingual Transfer Learning for Conversational Tasks using Prompt-Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.01295/) (2023)
- [InstructTODS: Large Language Models for End-to-End Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08885/) (2023)
- [Transfer-Free Data-Efficient Multilingual Slot Labeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13528/) (2023)
- [A Systematic Study of Performance Disparities in Multilingual Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.12892/) (2023)
- [Multilingual Dialogue Generation and Localization with Dialogue Act Scripting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.22086/) (2025)
- [IndoToD: A Multi-Domain Indonesian Benchmark For End-to-End Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.00958/) (2023)
- [PerSHOP -- A Persian dataset for shopping dialogue systems modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.00811/) (2024)
- [JMultiWOZ: A Large-Scale Japanese Multi-Domain Task-Oriented Dialogue Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17319/) (2024)
- [KwaiChat: A Large-Scale Video-Driven Multilingual Mixed-Type Dialogue Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.06899/) (2025)
- [Dial HEALTHDIAL for Advice: A Multilingual and Multi-Parallel Spoken Dialogue Dataset for Knowledge-Grounded Information Seeking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.30107/) (2026)
- [CultureTalk-ID: A Multi-Task Dialogue Benchmark for Cultural Commonsense in Indonesian Local Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.21016/) (2026)
- [FineWeb-CLaR: Culture, Language, and Region Annotations for Benchmark-Aligned Corpus Auditing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.25298/) (2026)
- [BaatCheet: A Multilingual Corpus for Dialogue Translation in Indian Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.33296/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Multilingual task-oriented dialogue (ToD) facilitates access to services and information for many (communities of) speakers. Nevertheless, the potential of this technology is not fully realised, as current datasets for multilingual ToD - both for modular and end-to-end modelling - suffer from severe limitations. 1) When created from scratch, they are usually small in scale and fail to cover many possible dialogue flows. 2) Translation-based ToD datasets might lack naturalness and cultural specificity in the target language. In this work, to tackle these limitations we propose a novel outline-based annotation process for multilingual ToD datasets, where domain-specific abstract schemata of dialogue are mapped into natural language outlines. These in turn guide the target language annotators in writing a dialogue by providing instructions about each turn's intents and slots. Through this process we annotate a new large-scale dataset for training and evaluation of multilingual and cross-lingual ToD systems. Our Cross-lingual Outline-based Dialogue dataset (termed COD) enables natural language understanding, dialogue state tracking, and end-to-end dialogue modelling and evaluation in 4 diverse languages: Arabic, Indonesian, Russian, and Kiswahili. Qualitative and quantitative analyses of COD versus an equivalent translation-based dataset demonstrate improvements in data quality, unlocked by the outline-based approach. Finally, we benchmark a series of state-of-the-art systems for cross-lingual ToD, setting reference scores for future work and demonstrating that COD prevents over-inflated performance, typically met with prior translation-based ToD datasets.