Dialog2Flow: Pre-training Soft-Contrastive Action-Driven Sentence Embeddings for Automatic Dialog Flow Extraction

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Burdisso, Sergio, Madikeri, Srikanth, Motlicek, Petr
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Burdisso, Sergio
Madikeri, Srikanth
Motlicek, Petr
author_facet Burdisso, Sergio
Madikeri, Srikanth
Motlicek, Petr
contents Efficiently deriving structured workflows from unannotated dialogs remains an underexplored and formidable challenge in computational linguistics. Automating this process could significantly accelerate the manual design of workflows in new domains and enable the grounding of large language models in domain-specific flowcharts, enhancing transparency and controllability. In this paper, we introduce Dialog2Flow (D2F) embeddings, which differ from conventional sentence embeddings by mapping utterances to a latent space where they are grouped according to their communicative and informative functions (i.e., the actions they represent). D2F allows for modeling dialogs as continuous trajectories in a latent space with distinct action-related regions. By clustering D2F embeddings, the latent space is quantized, and dialogs can be converted into sequences of region/action IDs, facilitating the extraction of the underlying workflow. To pre-train D2F, we build a comprehensive dataset by unifying twenty task-oriented dialog datasets with normalized per-turn action annotations. We also introduce a novel soft contrastive loss that leverages the semantic information of these actions to guide the representation learning process, showing superior performance compared to standard supervised contrastive loss. Evaluation against various sentence embeddings, including dialog-specific ones, demonstrates that D2F yields superior qualitative and quantitative results across diverse domains.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_18481
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Dialog2Flow: Pre-training Soft-Contrastive Action-Driven Sentence Embeddings for Automatic Dialog Flow Extraction
Burdisso, Sergio
Madikeri, Srikanth
Motlicek, Petr
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Efficiently deriving structured workflows from unannotated dialogs remains an underexplored and formidable challenge in computational linguistics. Automating this process could significantly accelerate the manual design of workflows in new domains and enable the grounding of large language models in domain-specific flowcharts, enhancing transparency and controllability. In this paper, we introduce Dialog2Flow (D2F) embeddings, which differ from conventional sentence embeddings by mapping utterances to a latent space where they are grouped according to their communicative and informative functions (i.e., the actions they represent). D2F allows for modeling dialogs as continuous trajectories in a latent space with distinct action-related regions. By clustering D2F embeddings, the latent space is quantized, and dialogs can be converted into sequences of region/action IDs, facilitating the extraction of the underlying workflow. To pre-train D2F, we build a comprehensive dataset by unifying twenty task-oriented dialog datasets with normalized per-turn action annotations. We also introduce a novel soft contrastive loss that leverages the semantic information of these actions to guide the representation learning process, showing superior performance compared to standard supervised contrastive loss. Evaluation against various sentence embeddings, including dialog-specific ones, demonstrates that D2F yields superior qualitative and quantitative results across diverse domains.
title Dialog2Flow: Pre-training Soft-Contrastive Action-Driven Sentence Embeddings for Automatic Dialog Flow Extraction
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.18481