Generalizable Retrieve-Based Method for Task Oriented Dialogue State Tracking

Dialogue state tracking(DST) is an essential component of task oriented dialogue(TOD) system. Recent research in schema guided DST utilizing semantic information offered by schema has seen great progress in transferring to new unseen domains. However, schema size grows as function supported by TOD system grows, which will consequently decrease efficiency of previous DST models. To deal with growing schema size, we propose a retrieve based DST(RB-DST) method. RB-DST retrieves a small set of candidate slots from schema first and thus is much more insensitive to schema size. Evaluation results show that RB-DST achieves better performance than baseline approach and exhibits strong transfer ability compared to state-of-the-art models. Data and code are available at https://github.com/yihengzhu-dev/retireved-based-DST.