Augmenting Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems with Relation Extraction

Abstract: The standard task-oriented dialogue pipeline uses intent classification and slot-filling to interpret user utterances. While this approach can handle a wide range of queries, it does not extract the information needed to handle more complex queries that contain relationships between slots. We propose integration of relation extraction into this pipeline as an effective way to expand the capabilities of dialogue systems. We evaluate our approach by using an internal dataset with slot and relation annotations spanning three domains. Finally, we show how slot-filling annotation schemes can be simplified once the expressive power of relation annotations is available, reducing the number of slots while still capturing the user's intended meaning.