# Manual-Guided Dialogue for Flexible Conversational Agents

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2208.07597 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.07597/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 25 of its 34 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Aug 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 25 of 25)

- [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)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [MultiWOZ -- A Large-Scale Multi-Domain Wizard-of-Oz Dataset for Task-Oriented Dialogue Modelling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.00278/) (2018)
- [Texygen: A Benchmarking Platform for Text Generation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.01886/) (2018)
- [Towards Scalable Multi-domain Conversational Agents: The Schema-Guided Dialogue Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.05855/) (2019)
- [QuAC : Question Answering in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.07036/) (2018)
- [A Simple Language Model for Task-Oriented Dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00796/) (2020)
- [The E2E Dataset: New Challenges For End-to-End Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.09254/) (2017)
- [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)
- [TransferTransfo: A Transfer Learning Approach for Neural Network Based Conversational Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.08149/) (2019)
- [Neural Approaches to Conversational AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.08267/) (2018)
- [Taskmaster-1: Toward a Realistic and Diverse Dialog Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.05358/) (2019)
- [Key-Value Retrieval Networks for Task-Oriented Dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.05414/) (2017)
- [TripPy: A Triple Copy Strategy for Value Independent Neural Dialog State Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.02877/) (2020)
- [doc2dial: A Goal-Oriented Document-Grounded Dialogue Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.06623/) (2020)
- [Frames: A Corpus for Adding Memory to Goal-Oriented Dialogue Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00057/) (2017)
- [Recent Advances and Challenges in Task-oriented Dialog System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.07490/) (2020)
- [Interpretation of Natural Language Rules in Conversational Machine Reading](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.01494/) (2018)
- [Action-Based Conversations Dataset: A Corpus for Building More In-Depth Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00783/) (2021)
- [Dialog State Tracking: A Neural Reading Comprehension Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.01946/) (2019)
- [A Bi-model based RNN Semantic Frame Parsing Model for Intent Detection and Slot Filling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.10235/) (2018)
- [Multi-domain Dialogue State Tracking as Dynamic Knowledge Graph Enhanced Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.06192/) (2019)
- [Alexa Conversations: An Extensible Data-driven Approach for Building Task-oriented Dialogue Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09088/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

How to build and use dialogue data efficiently, and how to deploy models in different domains at scale can be two critical issues in building a task-oriented dialogue system. In this paper, we propose a novel manual-guided dialogue scheme to alleviate these problems, where the agent learns the tasks from both dialogue and manuals. The manual is an unstructured textual document that guides the agent in interacting with users and the database during the conversation. Our proposed scheme reduces the dependence of dialogue models on fine-grained domain ontology, and makes them more flexible to adapt to various domains. We then contribute a fully-annotated multi-domain dataset MagDial to support our scheme. It introduces three dialogue modeling subtasks: instruction matching, argument filling, and response generation. Modeling these subtasks is consistent with the human agent's behavior patterns. Experiments demonstrate that the manual-guided dialogue scheme improves data efficiency and domain scalability in building dialogue systems. The dataset and benchmark will be publicly available for promoting future research.