Papers by Shahin Shayandeh
Database Search Results Disambiguation for Task-Oriented Dialog Systems (2022.naacl-main)
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Kun Qian, Satwik Kottur, Ahmad Beirami, Shahin Shayandeh, Paul Crook, Alborz Geramifard, Zhou Yu, Chinnadhurai Sankar
| Challenge: | Task-oriented dialog systems can't handle multiplesearch results when querying a database due to the lack of such scenarios in existing datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose a task that focuses on disambiguating database search results by synthetically generating turns through a pre-defined grammar and collecting human paraphrases for a subset. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task improves performance on DSR-disambiguation even in the absence of in-domain data, suggesting it can be learned as a universal dialog skill. |
Conversation Learner - A Machine Teaching Tool for Building Dialog Managers for Task-Oriented Dialog Systems (2020.acl-demos)
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Swadheen Shukla, Lars Liden, Shahin Shayandeh, Eslam Kamal, Jinchao Li, Matt Mazzola, Thomas Park, Baolin Peng, Jianfeng Gao
| Challenge: | a wide variety of tasks have created a need for flexible task-oriented dialog systems . dialog flows are intuitively interpretable but lack the flexibility needed to handle complex dialogs . |
| Approach: | They propose a machine teaching tool for building dialog managers using familiar tools . they convert the dialog flow into a parametric model and use user-system dialog logs as training data . |
| Outcome: | The proposed tool combines the best of both approaches to build dialog managers . it converts the dialog flow into a parametric model and improves it over time . |
Know Thy Strengths: Comprehensive Dialogue State Tracking Diagnostics (2022.findings-emnlp)
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Hyundong Cho, Chinnadhurai Sankar, Christopher Lin, Kaushik Sadagopan, Shahin Shayandeh, Asli Celikyilmaz, Jonathan May, Ahmad Beirami
| Challenge: | Recent studies have revealed the vulnerability of dialogue state tracking models to distributional shifts, resulting in poor performance. |
| Approach: | They present a toolkit for standardized and comprehensive dialogue state tracking diagnoses that provides a richer summary of strengths and weaknesses. |
| Outcome: | The proposed toolkit shows that different classes of DST models have clear strengths and weaknesses, while generation models are more promising for handling language variety and span-based classification models are robust to unseen entities. |
Soloist: Building Task Bots at Scale with Transfer Learning and Machine Teaching (2021.tacl-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for building task-oriented dialog systems are limited to a few tasks and domains. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses transfer learning and machine teaching to build task bots at scale. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods on well-studied task-oriented dialog benchmarks on well studied tasks. |
Guided Dialogue Policy Learning without Adversarial Learning in the Loop (2020.findings-emnlp)
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Ziming Li, Sungjin Lee, Baolin Peng, Jinchao Li, Julia Kiseleva, Maarten de Rijke, Shahin Shayandeh, Jianfeng Gao
| Challenge: | Reinforcement learning methods suffer from sparse and unstable reward signals . alternating training of dialogue agent and reward model can get stuck in local optima . |
| Approach: | They propose to decompose adversarial training into two steps to improve dialogue policy learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves remarkable task success rate using both on-policy and off-poly reinforcement learning methods. |