# Roll Up Your Sleeves: Working with a Collaborative and Engaging Task-Oriented Dialogue System

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.16081 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.16081/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 9 of its 10 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Jul 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [Scaling Instruction-Finetuned Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11416/) (2022)
- [Towards Scalable Multi-domain Conversational Agents: The Schema-Guided Dialogue Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.05855/) (2019)
- [Multi-Task Pre-Training for Plug-and-Play Task-Oriented Dialogue System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.14739/) (2021)
- [Task-Oriented Dialogue as Dataflow Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.11423/) (2020)
- [Recipe1M+: A Dataset for Learning Cross-Modal Embeddings for Cooking Recipes and Food Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.06553/) (2018)
- [Alexa, Let's Work Together: Introducing the First Alexa Prize TaskBot Challenge on Conversational Task Assistance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.06321/) (2022)
- [Towards Transparent Interactive Semantic Parsing via Step-by-Step Correction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.08345/) (2021)
- [Bootstrapping a User-Centered Task-Oriented Dialogue System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.05223/) (2022)
- [Neural Generation Meets Real People: Building a Social, Informative Open-Domain Dialogue Agent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12021/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [User Modeling in the Era of Large Language Models: Current Research and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.11518/) (2023)
- [HierTOD: A Task-Oriented Dialogue System Driven by Hierarchical Goals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.07152/) (2024)
- [MemAudit: Auditing Long-Term Agent Memory via Hidden User-State Recovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.24595/) (2026)
- [Mind2Dialogue: Training Human-Aware Language Models by Simulating User Mental States](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.15972/) (2026)
- [VIGiA: Instructional Video Guidance via Dialogue Reasoning and Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.19146/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We introduce TacoBot, a user-centered task-oriented digital assistant designed to guide users through complex real-world tasks with multiple steps. Covering a wide range of cooking and how-to tasks, we aim to deliver a collaborative and engaging dialogue experience. Equipped with language understanding, dialogue management, and response generation components supported by a robust search engine, TacoBot ensures efficient task assistance. To enhance the dialogue experience, we explore a series of data augmentation strategies using LLMs to train advanced neural models continuously. TacoBot builds upon our successful participation in the inaugural Alexa Prize TaskBot Challenge, where our team secured third place among ten competing teams. We offer TacoBot as an open-source framework that serves as a practical example for deploying task-oriented dialogue systems.