As the core of task-oriented dialogue systems, dialogue state tracking (DST) is designed to track the dialogue state through the conversation between users and systems. Multi-domain DST has been an important challenge in which the dialogue states across multiple domains need to consider. In recent mainstream approaches, each domain and slot are aggregated and regarded as a single query feeding into attention with the dialogue history to obtain domain-slot specific representations. In this work, we propose disentangled domain-slot attention for multi-domain dialogue state tracking. The proposed approach disentangles the domain-slot specific information extraction in a flexible and context-dependent manner by separating the query about domains and slots in the attention component. Through a series of experiments on MultiWOZ 2.0 and MultiWOZ 2.4 datasets, we demonstrate that our proposed approach outperforms the standard multi-head attention with aggregated domain-slot query.

Dialogue state tracking (DST) is designed to track the dialogue state during the conversations between users and systems, which is the core of task-oriented dialogue systems. Mainstream models predict the values for each slot with fully token-wise slot attention from dialogue history. However, such operations may result in overlooking the neighboring relationship. Moreover, it may lead the model to assign probability mass to irrelevant parts, while these parts contribute little. It becomes severe with the increase in dialogue length. Therefore, we investigate sparse local slot attention for DST in this work. Slot-specific local semantic information is obtained at a sub-sampled temporal resolution capturing local dependencies for each slot. Then these local representations are attended with sparse attention weights to guide the model to pay attention to relevant parts of local information for subsequent state value prediction. The experimental results on MultiWOZ 2.0 and 2.4 datasets show that the proposed approach effectively improves the performance of ontology-based dialogue state tracking, and performs better than token-wise attention for long dialogues.

As an important component of task-oriented dialogue systems, dialogue state tracking is designed to track the dialogue state through the conversations between users and systems. Multi-domain dialogue state tracking is a challenging task, in which the correlation among different domains and slots needs to consider. Recently, slot self-attention is proposed to provide a data-driven manner to handle it. However, a full-support slot self-attention may involve redundant information interchange. In this paper, we propose a top-k attention-based slot self-attention for multi-domain dialogue state tracking. In the slot self-attention layers, we force each slot to involve information from the other k prominent slots and mask the rest out. The experimental results on two mainstream multi-domain task-oriented dialogue datasets, MultiWOZ 2.0 and MultiWOZ 2.4, present that our proposed approach is effective to improve the performance of multi-domain dialogue state tracking. We also find that the best result is obtained when each slot interchanges information with only a few slots.