# Benchmarks Underestimate the Readiness of Multi-lingual Dialogue Agents

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.17840 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.17840/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in General LLM agent frameworks and benchmarks, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use.
- Builds on 29 of its 39 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 May 2024.

## Placed in

- LLM agents and tool use / [General LLM agent frameworks and benchmarks](https://mlsanity.com/agents/general-llm-agent-frameworks-and-benchmarks/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 29 of 29)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [The Curious Case of Neural Text Degeneration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09751/) (2019)
- [MultiWOZ -- A Large-Scale Multi-Domain Wizard-of-Oz Dataset for Task-Oriented Dialogue Modelling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.00278/) (2018)
- [Beyond English-Centric Multilingual Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11125/) (2020)
- [Towards Scalable Multi-domain Conversational Agents: The Schema-Guided Dialogue Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.05855/) (2019)
- [MEGA: Multilingual Evaluation of Generative AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12528/) (2023)
- [Leak, Cheat, Repeat: Data Contamination and Evaluation Malpractices in Closed-Source LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03927/) (2024)
- [MultiWOZ 2.2 : A Dialogue Dataset with Additional Annotation Corrections and State Tracking Baselines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.12720/) (2020)
- [Taskmaster-1: Toward a Realistic and Diverse Dialog Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.05358/) (2019)
- [Task-Oriented Dialogue as Dataflow Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.11423/) (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)
- [CrossWOZ: A Large-Scale Chinese Cross-Domain Task-Oriented Dialogue Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.11893/) (2020)
- [Zero-Shot Transfer Learning with Synthesized Data for Multi-Domain Dialogue State Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00891/) (2020)
- [BiToD: A Bilingual Multi-Domain Dataset For Task-Oriented Dialogue Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.02787/) (2021)
- [MultiWOZ 2.3: A multi-domain task-oriented dialogue dataset enhanced with annotation corrections and co-reference annotation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05594/) (2020)
- [Description-Driven Task-Oriented Dialog Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.08904/) (2022)
- [RiSAWOZ: A Large-Scale Multi-Domain Wizard-of-Oz Dataset with Rich Semantic Annotations for Task-Oriented Dialogue Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.08738/) (2020)
- [Conversational Semantic Parsing for Dialog State Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.12770/) (2020)
- [Hierarchical Prompting Assists Large Language Model on Web Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14257/) (2023)
- [SGD-X: A Benchmark for Robust Generalization in Schema-Guided Dialogue Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.06800/) (2021)
- [Zero-shot Generalization in Dialog State Tracking through Generative Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.08333/) (2021)
- [GlobalWoZ: Globalizing MultiWoZ to Develop Multilingual Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07679/) (2021)
- [A Preliminary Evaluation of ChatGPT for Zero-shot Dialogue Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.04256/) (2023)
- [Multi2WOZ: A Robust Multilingual Dataset and Conversational Pretraining for Task-Oriented Dialog](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.10400/) (2022)
- [X-RiSAWOZ: High-Quality End-to-End Multilingual Dialogue Datasets and Few-shot Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.17674/) (2023)
- [Contextual Semantic Parsing for Multilingual Task-Oriented Dialogues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.02574/) (2021)
- [A Few-Shot Semantic Parser for Wizard-of-Oz Dialogues with the Precise ThingTalk Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.07968/) (2020)
- [ThingTalk: An Extensible, Executable Representation Language for Task-Oriented Dialogues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12751/) (2022)
- [Zero and Few-Shot Localization of Task-Oriented Dialogue Agents with a Distilled Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.09424/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Sibyl: Simple yet Effective Agent Framework for Complex Real-world Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.10718/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Creating multilingual task-oriented dialogue (TOD) agents is challenging due to the high cost of training data acquisition. Following the research trend of improving training data efficiency, we show for the first time, that in-context learning is sufficient to tackle multilingual TOD. To handle the challenging dialogue state tracking (DST) subtask, we break it down to simpler steps that are more compatible with in-context learning where only a handful of few-shot examples are used. We test our approach on the multilingual TOD dataset X-RiSAWOZ, which has 12 domains in Chinese, English, French, Korean, Hindi, and code-mixed Hindi-English. Our turn-by-turn DST accuracy on the 6 languages range from 55.6% to 80.3%, seemingly worse than the SOTA results from fine-tuned models that achieve from 60.7% to 82.8%; our BLEU scores in the response generation (RG) subtask are also significantly lower than SOTA. However, after manual evaluation of the validation set, we find that by correcting gold label errors and improving dataset annotation schema, GPT-4 with our prompts can achieve (1) 89.6%-96.8% accuracy in DST, and (2) more than 99% correct response generation across different languages. This leads us to conclude that current automatic metrics heavily underestimate the effectiveness of in-context learning.