Sequicity: Simplifying Task-oriented Dialogue Systems with Single Sequence-to-Sequence Architectures

Existing solutions to task-oriented dialogue systems follow pipeline designs which introduce architectural complexity and fragility. We propose a novel, holistic, extendable framework based on a single sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) model which can be optimized with supervised or reinforcement learning. A key contribution is that we design text spans named belief spans to track dialogue believes, allowing task-oriented dialogue systems to be modeled in a seq2seq way. Based on this, we propose a simplistic Two Stage CopyNet instantiation which demonstrates good scalability: significantly reducing model complexity in terms of number of parameters and training time by an order of magnitude. It significantly outperforms state-of-the-art pipeline-based methods on two datasets and retains a satisfactory entity match rate on out-of-vocabulary (OOV) cases where pipeline-designed competitors totally fail.