# MonoTODia: Translating Monologue Requests to Task-Oriented Dialogues

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.17268 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.17268/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 31 of its 49 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Feb 2025.

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

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13461/) (2019)
- [BERTScore: Evaluating Text Generation with BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09675/) (2019)
- [MultiWOZ -- A Large-Scale Multi-Domain Wizard-of-Oz Dataset for Task-Oriented Dialogue Modelling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.00278/) (2018)
- [Instruction Tuning for Large Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10792/) (2023)
- [Towards Scalable Multi-domain Conversational Agents: The Schema-Guided Dialogue Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.05855/) (2019)
- [Repairing the Cracked Foundation: A Survey of Obstacles in Evaluation Practices for Generated Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.06935/) (2022)
- [Is Model Collapse Inevitable? Breaking the Curse of Recursion by Accumulating Real and Synthetic Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01413/) (2024)
- [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)
- [Recent Advances in Deep Learning Based Dialogue Systems: A Systematic Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.04387/) (2021)
- [Survey on Evaluation Methods for Dialogue Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.04071/) (2019)
- [A Note on Shumailov et al. (2024): `AI Models Collapse When Trained on Recursively Generated Data'](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.12954/) (2024)
- [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)
- [PLACES: Prompting Language Models for Social Conversation Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.03269/) (2023)
- [Controllable Dialogue Simulation with In-Context Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.04185/) (2022)
- [AuGPT: Auxiliary Tasks and Data Augmentation for End-To-End Dialogue with Pre-Trained Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05126/) (2021)
- [Task-Optimized Adapters for an End-to-End Task-Oriented Dialogue System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.02468/) (2023)
- [Building a Role Specified Open-Domain Dialogue System Leveraging Large-Scale Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.00176/) (2022)
- [LAD: Language Models as Data for Zero-Shot Dialog](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.14393/) (2022)
- [SynthDST: Synthetic Data is All You Need for Few-Shot Dialog State Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.02285/) (2024)
- [Conversation Graph: Data Augmentation, Training and Evaluation for Non-Deterministic Dialogue Management](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.15411/) (2020)
- [HR-MultiWOZ: A Task Oriented Dialogue (TOD) Dataset for HR LLM Agent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.01018/) (2024)
- [Sequence-to-Sequence Models for Data-to-Text Natural Language Generation: Word- vs. Character-based Processing and Output Diversity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04864/) (2018)
- [CAiRE in DialDoc21: Data Augmentation for Information-Seeking Dialogue System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03530/) (2021)
- [SYNERGY: Building Task Bots at Scale Using Symbolic Knowledge and Machine Teaching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.11514/) (2021)
- [Contextual Data Augmentation for Task-Oriented Dialog Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10380/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Data scarcity is one of the main problems when it comes to real-world applications of transformer-based models. This is especially evident for task-oriented dialogue (TOD) systems, which require specialized datasets, that are usually not readily available. This can hinder companies from adding TOD systems to their services. This study therefore investigates a novel approach to sourcing annotated dialogues from existing German monologue material. Focusing on a real-world example, we investigate whether these monologues can be transformed into dialogue formats suitable for training TOD systems. We show the approach with the concrete example of a company specializing in travel bookings via e-mail. We fine-tune state-of-the-art Large Language Models for the task of rewriting e-mails as dialogues and annotating them. To ensure the quality and validity of the generated data, we employ crowd workers to evaluate the dialogues across multiple criteria and to provide gold-standard annotations for the test dataset. We further evaluate the usefulness of the dialogues for training TOD systems. Our evaluation shows that the dialogues and annotations are of high quality and can serve as a valuable starting point for training TOD systems. Finally, we make the annotated dataset publicly available to foster future research.