Robust Dialog State Tracking for Large Ontologies

Understand

The Dialog State Tracking Challenge 4 (DSTC 4) differentiates itself from the previous three editions as follows: the number of slot-value pairs present in the ontology is much larger, no spoken language understanding output is given, and utterances are labeled at the subdialog level.

• This paper describes a novel dialog state tracking method designed to work robustly under these conditions, using elaborate string matching, coreference resolution tailored for dialogs and a few other improvements.
• The method can correctly identify many values that are not explicitly present in the utterance.
• On the final evaluation, our method came in first among 7 competing teams and 24 entries.