TODSum: Task-Oriented Dialogue Summarization with State Tracking

Abstract: Previous dialogue summarization datasets mainly focus on open-domain chitchat dialogues, while summarization datasets for the broadly used task-oriented dialogue haven't been explored yet. Automatically summarizing such task-oriented dialogues can help a business collect and review needs to improve the service. Besides, previous datasets pay more attention to generate good summaries with higher ROUGE scores, but they hardly understand the structured information of dialogues and ignore the factuality of summaries. In this paper, we introduce a large-scale public Task-Oriented Dialogue Summarization dataset, TODSum, which aims to summarize the key points of the agent completing certain tasks with the user. Compared to existing work, TODSum suffers from severe scattered information issues and requires strict factual consistency, which makes it hard to directly apply recent dialogue summarization models. Therefore, we introduce additional dialogue state knowledge for TODSum to enhance the faithfulness of generated summaries. We hope a better understanding of conversational content helps summarization models generate concise and coherent summaries. Meanwhile, we establish a comprehensive benchmark for TODSum and propose a state-aware structured dialogue summarization model to integrate dialogue state information and dialogue history. Exhaustive experiments and qualitative analysis prove the effectiveness of dialogue structure guidance. Finally, we discuss the current issues of TODSum and potential development directions for future work.