A Study on Prompt-based Few-Shot Learning Methods for Belief State Tracking in Task-oriented Dialog Systems

We tackle the Dialogue Belief State Tracking(DST) problem of task-oriented conversational systems. Recent approaches to this problem leveraging Transformer-based models have yielded great results. However, training these models is expensive, both in terms of computational resources and time. Additionally, collecting high quality annotated dialogue datasets remains a challenge for researchers because of the extensive annotation required for training these models. Driven by the recent success of pre-trained language models and prompt-based learning, we explore prompt-based few-shot learning for Dialogue Belief State Tracking. We formulate the DST problem as a 2-stage prompt-based language modelling task and train language models for both tasks and present a comprehensive empirical analysis of their separate and joint performance. We demonstrate the potential of prompt-based methods in few-shot learning for DST and provide directions for future improvement.