A unified dialogue user simulator for few-shot data augmentation

Dazhen WAN
Zheng ZHANG
Qi ZHU
Lizi LIAO, Singapore Management University
Minlie HUANG

Abstract

Duplicate record, see https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/7719/. Pre-trained language models have shown superior performance in task-oriented dialogues. However, existing datasets are on limited scales, which cannot support large-scale pre-training. Fortunately, various data augmentation methods have been developed to augment largescale task-oriented dialogue corpora. However, they heavily rely on annotated data in the target domain, which require a tremendous amount of data collection and human labeling work. In this paper, we build a unified dialogue user simulation model by pre-training on several publicly available datasets. The model can then be tuned on a target domain with fewshot data. The experiments on a target dataset across multiple domains show that our proposed model brings remarkable performance increases through data augmentation.