# Q-TOD: A Query-driven Task-oriented Dialogue System

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.07564 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.07564/

## Key facts

- Cited by 10 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 31 of its 38 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Oct 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 31)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [LaMDA: Language Models for Dialog Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.08239/) (2022)
- [Retrieval Augmentation Reduces Hallucination in Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07567/) (2021)
- [Recipes for building an open-domain chatbot](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.13637/) (2020)
- [A Simple Language Model for Task-Oriented Dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00796/) (2020)
- [A Network-based End-to-End Trainable Task-oriented Dialogue System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.04562/) (2016)
- [UnifiedSKG: Unifying and Multi-Tasking Structured Knowledge Grounding with Text-to-Text Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.05966/) (2022)
- [Internet-Augmented Dialogue Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.07566/) (2021)
- [RocketQAv2: A Joint Training Method for Dense Passage Retrieval and Passage Re-ranking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07367/) (2021)
- [Open-Domain Question Answering Goes Conversational via Question Rewriting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04898/) (2020)
- [Multi-Task Pre-Training for Plug-and-Play Task-Oriented Dialogue System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.14739/) (2021)
- [Key-Value Retrieval Networks for Task-Oriented Dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.05414/) (2017)
- [UBAR: Towards Fully End-to-End Task-Oriented Dialog Systems with GPT-2](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.03539/) (2020)
- [MinTL: Minimalist Transfer Learning for Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.12005/) (2020)
- [GALAXY: A Generative Pre-trained Model for Task-Oriented Dialog with Semi-Supervised Learning and Explicit Policy Injection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14592/) (2021)
- [Language Models that Seek for Knowledge: Modular Search & Generation for Dialogue and Prompt Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13224/) (2022)
- [Question Rewriting for Conversational Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.14652/) (2020)
- [CONQRR: Conversational Query Rewriting for Retrieval with Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.08558/) (2021)
- [Global-to-local Memory Pointer Networks for Task-Oriented Dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.04713/) (2019)
- [Dynamic Fusion Network for Multi-Domain End-to-end Task-Oriented Dialog](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.11019/) (2020)
- [Learning Knowledge Bases with Parameters for Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.13656/) (2020)
- [Reason first, then respond: Modular Generation for Knowledge-infused Dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.05204/) (2021)
- [Pretraining the Noisy Channel Model for Task-Oriented Dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10518/) (2021)
- [Entity-Consistent End-to-end Task-Oriented Dialogue System with KB Retriever](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.06762/) (2019)
- [BORT: Back and Denoising Reconstruction for End-to-End Task-Oriented Dialog](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.02471/) (2022)
- [Sequence-to-Sequence Learning for Task-oriented Dialogue with Dialogue State Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.04441/) (2018)
- [Decoupled Dialogue Modeling and Semantic Parsing for Multi-Turn Text-to-SQL](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.02282/) (2021)
- [Constraint based Knowledge Base Distillation in End-to-End Task Oriented Dialogs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07396/) (2021)
- [CQR-SQL: Conversational Question Reformulation Enhanced Context-Dependent Text-to-SQL Parsers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.07686/) (2022)

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

- [A Survey of the Evolution of Language Model-Based Dialogue Systems: Data, Task and Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16789/) (2023)
- [End-to-end Task-oriented Dialogue: A Survey of Tasks, Methods, and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.09008/) (2023)
- [Multi-Grained Knowledge Retrieval for End-to-End Task-Oriented Dialog](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10149/) (2023)
- [Synergizing In-context Learning with Hints for End-to-end Task-oriented Dialog Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.15585/) (2024)
- [TransferTOD: A Generalizable Chinese Multi-Domain Task-Oriented Dialogue System with Transfer Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21693/) (2024)
- [Retrieval-Generation Alignment for End-to-End Task-Oriented Dialogue System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08877/) (2023)
- [Dual-Feedback Knowledge Retrieval for Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.14528/) (2023)
- [Query Enhanced Knowledge-Intensive Conversation via Unsupervised Joint Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09588/) (2022)
- [Multijugate Dual Learning for Low-Resource Task-Oriented Dialogue System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16106/) (2023)
- [Improving Multi-turn Task Completion in Task-Oriented Dialog Systems via Prompt Chaining and Fine-Grained Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13298/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Existing pipelined task-oriented dialogue systems usually have difficulties adapting to unseen domains, whereas end-to-end systems are plagued by large-scale knowledge bases in practice. In this paper, we introduce a novel query-driven task-oriented dialogue system, namely Q-TOD. The essential information from the dialogue context is extracted into a query, which is further employed to retrieve relevant knowledge records for response generation. Firstly, as the query is in the form of natural language and not confined to the schema of the knowledge base, the issue of domain adaption is alleviated remarkably in Q-TOD. Secondly, as the query enables the decoupling of knowledge retrieval from the generation, Q-TOD gets rid of the issue of knowledge base scalability. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed Q-TOD, we collect query annotations for three publicly available task-oriented dialogue datasets. Comprehensive experiments verify that Q-TOD outperforms strong baselines and establishes a new state-of-the-art performance on these datasets.