# LUNA: Learning Slot-Turn Alignment for Dialogue State Tracking

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.02550 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.02550/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 24 of its 32 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 May 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 24 of 24)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [MultiWOZ -- A Large-Scale Multi-Domain Wizard-of-Oz Dataset for Task-Oriented Dialogue Modelling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.00278/) (2018)
- [A Simple Language Model for Task-Oriented Dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00796/) (2020)
- [Transferable Multi-Domain State Generator for Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.08743/) (2019)
- [MultiWOZ 2.2 : A Dialogue Dataset with Additional Annotation Corrections and State Tracking Baselines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.12720/) (2020)
- [Neural Belief Tracker: Data-Driven Dialogue State Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.03777/) (2016)
- [TripPy: A Triple Copy Strategy for Value Independent Neural Dialog State Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.02877/) (2020)
- [DialoGLUE: A Natural Language Understanding Benchmark for Task-Oriented Dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.13570/) (2020)
- [Efficient Dialogue State Tracking by Selectively Overwriting Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.03906/) (2019)
- [Find or Classify? Dual Strategy for Slot-Value Predictions on Multi-Domain Dialog State Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.03544/) (2019)
- [SUMBT: Slot-Utterance Matching for Universal and Scalable Belief Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.07421/) (2019)
- [Global-Locally Self-Attentive Dialogue State Tracker](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.09655/) (2018)
- [CoCo: Controllable Counterfactuals for Evaluating Dialogue State Trackers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.12850/) (2020)
- [A Sequence-to-Sequence Approach to Dialogue State Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.09553/) (2020)
- [Preview, Attend and Review: Schema-Aware Curriculum Learning for Multi-Domain Dialog State Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.00291/) (2021)
- [Towards Universal Dialogue State Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.09587/) (2018)
- [An End-to-end Approach for Handling Unknown Slot Values in Dialogue State Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.01555/) (2018)
- [Efficient Context and Schema Fusion Networks for Multi-Domain Dialogue State Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.03386/) (2020)
- [Slot Self-Attentive Dialogue State Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.09374/) (2021)
- [A Contextual Hierarchical Attention Network with Adaptive Objective for Dialogue State Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.01554/) (2020)
- [Modeling Long Context for Task-Oriented Dialogue State Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.14080/) (2020)
- [Parallel Interactive Networks for Multi-Domain Dialogue State Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.07616/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Diable: Efficient Dialogue State Tracking as Operations on Tables](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.17020/) (2023)
- [MetaASSIST: Robust Dialogue State Tracking with Meta Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.12397/) (2022)
- [MoNET: Tackle State Momentum via Noise-Enhanced Training for Dialogue State Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.05503/) (2022)
- [Span-Selective Linear Attention Transformers for Effective and Robust Schema-Guided Dialogue State Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.09340/) (2023)
- [CSS: Combining Self-training and Self-supervised Learning for Few-shot Dialogue State Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.05146/) (2022)
- [Dialogue State Distillation Network with Inter-slot Contrastive Learning for Dialogue State Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.08220/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Dialogue state tracking (DST) aims to predict the current dialogue state given the dialogue history. Existing methods generally exploit the utterances of all dialogue turns to assign value for each slot. This could lead to suboptimal results due to the information introduced from irrelevant utterances in the dialogue history, which may be useless and can even cause confusion. To address this problem, we propose LUNA, a sLot-tUrN Alignment enhanced approach. It first explicitly aligns each slot with its most relevant utterance, then further predicts the corresponding value based on this aligned utterance instead of all dialogue utterances. Furthermore, we design a slot ranking auxiliary task to learn the temporal correlation among slots which could facilitate the alignment. Comprehensive experiments are conducted on multi-domain task-oriented dialogue datasets, i.e., MultiWOZ 2.0, MultiWOZ 2.1, and MultiWOZ 2.2. The results show that LUNA achieves new state-of-the-art results on these datasets.
