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  4. Self-training Improves Pre-training for Few-shot Learning in Task-oriented Dialog Systems
 
conference paper

Self-training Improves Pre-training for Few-shot Learning in Task-oriented Dialog Systems

Mi, Fei  
•
Zhou, Wanhao
•
Cai, Fengyu
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January 1, 2021
2021 Conference On Empirical Methods In Natural Language Processing (Emnlp 2021)
Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

As the labeling cost for different modules in task-oriented dialog (ToD) systems is expensive, a major challenge is to train different modules with the least amount of labeled data. Recently, large-scale pre-trained language models, have shown promising results for few-shot learning in ToD. In this paper, we devise a self-training approach to utilize the abundant unlabeled dialog data to further improve state-of-the-art pre-trained models in few-shot learning scenarios for ToD systems. Specifically, we propose a self-training approach that iteratively labels the most confident unlabeled data to train a stronger Student model. Moreover, a new text augmentation technique (GradAug) is proposed to better train the Student by replacing non-crucial tokens using a masked language model. We conduct extensive experiments and present analyses on four downstream tasks in ToD, including intent classification, dialog state tracking, dialog act prediction, and response selection. Empirical results demonstrate that the proposed self-training approach consistently improves state-of-the-art pre-trained models (BERT, ToD-BERT) when only a small number of labeled data are available.

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Type
conference paper
DOI
10.18653/v1/2021.emnlp-main.142
Web of Science ID

WOS:000855966302001

Author(s)
Mi, Fei  
Zhou, Wanhao
Cai, Fengyu
Kong, Lingjing
Huang, Minlie
Faltings, Boi  
Date Issued

2021-01-01

Publisher

ASSOC COMPUTATIONAL LINGUISTICS-ACL

Publisher place

Stroudsburg

Published in
2021 Conference On Empirical Methods In Natural Language Processing (Emnlp 2021)
ISBN of the book

978-1-955917-09-4

Start page

1887

End page

1898

Subjects

Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence

•

Computer Science, Interdisciplinary Applications

•

Linguistics

•

Computer Science

Editorial or Peer reviewed

REVIEWED

Written at

EPFL

EPFL units
LIA  
Event nameEvent placeEvent date
Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

Punta Cana, DOMINICAN REP

Nov 07-11, 2021

Available on Infoscience
November 7, 2022
Use this identifier to reference this record
https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/191949
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