Task-Oriented Dialogue as Dataflow Synthesis

Understand

We describe an approach to task-oriented dialogue in which dialogue state is represented as a dataflow graph.

• A dialogue agent maps each user utterance to a program that extends this graph.
• Programs include metacomputation operators for reference and revision that reuse dataflow fragments from previous turns.
• Our graph-based state enables the expression and manipulation of complex user intents, and explicit metacomputation makes these intents easier for learned models to predict.