A Simple Language Model for Task-Oriented Dialogue

Understand

Task-oriented dialogue is often decomposed into three tasks: understanding user input, deciding actions, and generating a response.

• While such decomposition might suggest a dedicated model for each sub-task, we find a simple, unified approach leads to state-of-the-art performance on the MultiWOZ dataset.
• SimpleTOD is a simple approach to task-oriented dialogue that uses a single, causal language model trained on all sub-tasks recast as a single sequence prediction problem.
• This allows SimpleTOD to fully leverage transfer learning from pre-trained, open domain, causal language models such as GPT-2.