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User Satisfaction Estimation with Sequential Dialogue Act Modeling in Goal-oriented Conversational Systems

Published: 25 April 2022 Publication History
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  • Abstract

    User Satisfaction Estimation (USE) is an important yet challenging task in goal-oriented conversational systems. Whether the user is satisfied with the system largely depends on the fulfillment of the user’s needs, which can be implicitly reflected by users’ dialogue acts. However, existing studies often neglect the sequential transitions of dialogue act or rely heavily on annotated dialogue act labels when utilizing dialogue acts to facilitate USE. In this paper, we propose a novel framework, namely USDA, to incorporate the sequential dynamics of dialogue acts for predicting user satisfaction, by jointly learning User Satisfaction Estimation and Dialogue Act Recognition tasks. In specific, we first employ a Hierarchical Transformer to encode the whole dialogue context, with two task-adaptive pre-training strategies to be a second-phase in-domain pre-training for enhancing the dialogue modeling ability. In terms of the availability of dialogue act labels, we further develop two variants of USDA to capture the dialogue act information in either supervised or unsupervised manners. Finally, USDA leverages the sequential transitions of both content and act features in the dialogue to predict the user satisfaction. Experimental results on four benchmark goal-oriented dialogue datasets across different applications show that the proposed method substantially and consistently outperforms existing methods on USE, and validate the important role of dialogue act sequences in USE.

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    • (2024)Modeling the impact of out-of-schema questions in task-oriented dialog systemsData Mining and Knowledge Discovery10.1007/s10618-024-01039-638:4(2466-2494)Online publication date: 4-Jun-2024
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            cover image ACM Conferences
            WWW '22: Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2022
            April 2022
            3764 pages
            ISBN:9781450390965
            DOI:10.1145/3485447
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            Published: 25 April 2022

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            Author Tags

            1. Dialogue Act Recognition
            2. Goal-oriented Conversational System
            3. User Satisfaction Estimation

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            • Research-article
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            • Center for Perceptual and Interactive Intelligence (CPII) Ltd under the Innovation and Technology Commission's InnoHK scheme

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            WWW '22
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            WWW '22: The ACM Web Conference 2022
            April 25 - 29, 2022
            Virtual Event, Lyon, France

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            Overall Acceptance Rate 1,899 of 8,196 submissions, 23%

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            Cited By

            View all
            • (2024)Modeling the impact of out-of-schema questions in task-oriented dialog systemsData Mining and Knowledge Discovery10.1007/s10618-024-01039-638:4(2466-2494)Online publication date: 4-Jun-2024
            • (2024)Continual Learning in Chit-Chat SystemsLifelong and Continual Learning Dialogue Systems10.1007/978-3-031-48189-5_5(103-126)Online publication date: 9-Jan-2024
            • (2023)Unlocking the Potential of User Feedback: Leveraging Large Language Model as User Simulators to Enhance Dialogue SystemProceedings of the 32nd ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management10.1145/3583780.3615220(3953-3957)Online publication date: 21-Oct-2023
            • (2023)System Initiative Prediction for Multi-turn Conversational Information SeekingProceedings of the 32nd ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management10.1145/3583780.3615070(1807-1817)Online publication date: 21-Oct-2023
            • (2023)EmoUS: Simulating User Emotions in Task-Oriented DialoguesProceedings of the 46th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval10.1145/3539618.3592092(2526-2531)Online publication date: 19-Jul-2023

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