# System-Initiated Transitions from Chit-Chat to Task-Oriented Dialogues with Transition Info Extractor and Transition Sentence Generator

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.03098 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.03098/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 26 of its 58 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Aug 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 26 of 26)

- [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)
- [BERTScore: Evaluating Text Generation with BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09675/) (2019)
- [Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning for NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.00751/) (2019)
- [The Power of Scale for Parameter-Efficient Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08691/) (2021)
- [The Curious Case of Neural Text Degeneration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09751/) (2019)
- [Pre-train, Prompt, and Predict: A Systematic Survey of Prompting Methods in Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.13586/) (2021)
- [A Diversity-Promoting Objective Function for Neural Conversation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1510.03055/) (2015)
- [AdapterFusion: Non-Destructive Task Composition for Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00247/) (2020)
- [MultiWOZ -- A Large-Scale Multi-Domain Wizard-of-Oz Dataset for Task-Oriented Dialogue Modelling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.00278/) (2018)
- [AdapterHub: A Framework for Adapting Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.07779/) (2020)
- [End-to-end Sequence Labeling via Bi-directional LSTM-CNNs-CRF](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.01354/) (2016)
- [BERT for Joint Intent Classification and Slot Filling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.10909/) (2019)
- [Attention-Based Recurrent Neural Network Models for Joint Intent Detection and Slot Filling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.01454/) (2016)
- [Towards Conversational Recommendation over Multi-Type Dialogs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.03954/) (2020)
- [MultiWOZ 2.4: A Multi-Domain Task-Oriented Dialogue Dataset with Essential Annotation Corrections to Improve State Tracking Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00773/) (2021)
- [End-to-End Slot Alignment and Recognition for Cross-Lingual NLU](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.14353/) (2020)
- [Personalized Prompt Learning for Explainable Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.07371/) (2022)
- [Lightweight Adapter Tuning for Multilingual Speech Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01463/) (2021)
- [The Dialogue Dodecathlon: Open-Domain Knowledge and Image Grounded Conversational Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.03768/) (2019)
- [The Adapter-Bot: All-In-One Controllable Conversational Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.12579/) (2020)
- [Fusing task-oriented and open-domain dialogues in conversational agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.04137/) (2021)
- [SalesBot: Transitioning from Chit-Chat to Task-Oriented Dialogues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.10591/) (2022)
- [UniDS: A Unified Dialogue System for Chit-Chat and Task-oriented Dialogues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.08032/) (2021)
- [Unified Conversational Models with System-Initiated Transitions between Chit-Chat and Task-Oriented Dialogues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01664/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Automatic Metrics in Natural Language Generation: A Survey of Current Evaluation Practices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.09169/) (2024)
- [Chitchat as Interference: Adding User Backstories to Task-Oriented Dialogues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.15248/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this work, we study dialogue scenarios that start from chit-chat but eventually switch to task-related services, and investigate how a unified dialogue model, which can engage in both chit-chat and task-oriented dialogues, takes the initiative during the dialogue mode transition from chit-chat to task-oriented in a coherent and cooperative manner. We firstly build a {transition info extractor} (TIE) that keeps track of the preceding chit-chat interaction and detects the potential user intention to switch to a task-oriented service. Meanwhile, in the unified model, a {transition sentence generator} (TSG) is extended through efficient Adapter tuning and transition prompt learning. When the TIE successfully finds task-related information from the preceding chit-chat, such as a transition domain, then the TSG is activated automatically in the unified model to initiate this transition by generating a transition sentence under the guidance of transition information extracted by TIE. The experimental results show promising performance regarding the proactive transitions. We achieve an additional large improvement on TIE model by utilizing Conditional Random Fields (CRF). The TSG can flexibly generate transition sentences while maintaining the unified capabilities of normal chit-chat and task-oriented response generation.