Leveraging Slot Descriptions for Zero-Shot Cross-Domain Dialogue State Tracking

Understand

Zero-shot cross-domain dialogue state tracking (DST) enables us to handle task-oriented dialogue in unseen domains without the expense of collecting in-domain data.

• In this paper, we propose a slot description enhanced generative approach for zero-shot cross-domain DST.
• Specifically, our model first encodes dialogue context and slots with a pre-trained self-attentive encoder, and generates slot values in an auto-regressive manner.
• In addition, we incorporate Slot Type Informed Descriptions that capture the shared information across slots to facilitate cross-domain knowledge transfer.