Text-to-SQL Task-oriented Dialogue Ontology Construction

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Vukovic, Renato, van Niekerk, Carel, Heck, Michael, Ruppik, Benjamin, Lin, Hsien-Chin, Feng, Shutong, Lubis, Nurul, Gasic, Milica
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Vukovic, Renato
van Niekerk, Carel
Heck, Michael
Ruppik, Benjamin
Lin, Hsien-Chin
Feng, Shutong
Lubis, Nurul
Gasic, Milica
author_facet Vukovic, Renato
van Niekerk, Carel
Heck, Michael
Ruppik, Benjamin
Lin, Hsien-Chin
Feng, Shutong
Lubis, Nurul
Gasic, Milica
contents Large language models (LLMs) are widely used as general-purpose knowledge sources, but they rely on parametric knowledge, limiting explainability and trustworthiness. In task-oriented dialogue (TOD) systems, this separation is explicit, using an external database structured by an explicit ontology to ensure explainability and controllability. However, building such ontologies requires manual labels or supervised training. We introduce TeQoDO: a Text-to-SQL task-oriented Dialogue Ontology construction method. Here, an LLM autonomously builds a TOD ontology from scratch using only its inherent SQL programming capabilities combined with concepts from modular TOD systems provided in the prompt. We show that TeQoDO outperforms transfer learning approaches, and its constructed ontology is competitive on a downstream dialogue state tracking task. Ablation studies demonstrate the key role of modular TOD system concepts. TeQoDO also scales to allow construction of much larger ontologies, which we investigate on a Wikipedia and arXiv dataset. We view this as a step towards broader application of ontologies.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_23358
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Text-to-SQL Task-oriented Dialogue Ontology Construction
Vukovic, Renato
van Niekerk, Carel
Heck, Michael
Ruppik, Benjamin
Lin, Hsien-Chin
Feng, Shutong
Lubis, Nurul
Gasic, Milica
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Databases
Information Retrieval
Large language models (LLMs) are widely used as general-purpose knowledge sources, but they rely on parametric knowledge, limiting explainability and trustworthiness. In task-oriented dialogue (TOD) systems, this separation is explicit, using an external database structured by an explicit ontology to ensure explainability and controllability. However, building such ontologies requires manual labels or supervised training. We introduce TeQoDO: a Text-to-SQL task-oriented Dialogue Ontology construction method. Here, an LLM autonomously builds a TOD ontology from scratch using only its inherent SQL programming capabilities combined with concepts from modular TOD systems provided in the prompt. We show that TeQoDO outperforms transfer learning approaches, and its constructed ontology is competitive on a downstream dialogue state tracking task. Ablation studies demonstrate the key role of modular TOD system concepts. TeQoDO also scales to allow construction of much larger ontologies, which we investigate on a Wikipedia and arXiv dataset. We view this as a step towards broader application of ontologies.
title Text-to-SQL Task-oriented Dialogue Ontology Construction
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Databases
Information Retrieval
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.23358