MonoTODia: Translating Monologue Requests to Task-Oriented Dialogues

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Steindl, Sebastian, Schäfer, Ulrich, Ludwig, Bernd
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Steindl, Sebastian
Schäfer, Ulrich
Ludwig, Bernd
author_facet Steindl, Sebastian
Schäfer, Ulrich
Ludwig, Bernd
contents Data scarcity is one of the main problems when it comes to real-world applications of transformer-based models. This is especially evident for task-oriented dialogue (TOD) systems, which require specialized datasets, that are usually not readily available. This can hinder companies from adding TOD systems to their services. This study therefore investigates a novel approach to sourcing annotated dialogues from existing German monologue material. Focusing on a real-world example, we investigate whether these monologues can be transformed into dialogue formats suitable for training TOD systems. We show the approach with the concrete example of a company specializing in travel bookings via e-mail. We fine-tune state-of-the-art Large Language Models for the task of rewriting e-mails as dialogues and annotating them. To ensure the quality and validity of the generated data, we employ crowd workers to evaluate the dialogues across multiple criteria and to provide gold-standard annotations for the test dataset. We further evaluate the usefulness of the dialogues for training TOD systems. Our evaluation shows that the dialogues and annotations are of high quality and can serve as a valuable starting point for training TOD systems. Finally, we make the annotated dataset publicly available to foster future research.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_17268
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle MonoTODia: Translating Monologue Requests to Task-Oriented Dialogues
Steindl, Sebastian
Schäfer, Ulrich
Ludwig, Bernd
Computation and Language
Data scarcity is one of the main problems when it comes to real-world applications of transformer-based models. This is especially evident for task-oriented dialogue (TOD) systems, which require specialized datasets, that are usually not readily available. This can hinder companies from adding TOD systems to their services. This study therefore investigates a novel approach to sourcing annotated dialogues from existing German monologue material. Focusing on a real-world example, we investigate whether these monologues can be transformed into dialogue formats suitable for training TOD systems. We show the approach with the concrete example of a company specializing in travel bookings via e-mail. We fine-tune state-of-the-art Large Language Models for the task of rewriting e-mails as dialogues and annotating them. To ensure the quality and validity of the generated data, we employ crowd workers to evaluate the dialogues across multiple criteria and to provide gold-standard annotations for the test dataset. We further evaluate the usefulness of the dialogues for training TOD systems. Our evaluation shows that the dialogues and annotations are of high quality and can serve as a valuable starting point for training TOD systems. Finally, we make the annotated dataset publicly available to foster future research.
title MonoTODia: Translating Monologue Requests to Task-Oriented Dialogues
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.17268