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DSTC9 Track 1 - Beyond Domain APIs: Task-oriented Conversational Modeling with Unstructured Knowledge Access

This repository contains the data, scripts and baseline codes for DSTC9 Track 1.

This challenge track aims to support frictionless task-oriented conversations, where the dialogue flow does not break when users have requests that are out of the scope of APIs/DB but potentially are already available in external knowledge sources. Track participants will develop dialogue systems to understand relevant domain knowledge, and generate system responses with the relevant selected knowledge.

Organizers: Seokhwan Kim, Mihail Eric, Behnam Hedayatnia, Karthik Gopalakrishnan, Yang Liu, Chao-Wei Huang, Dilek Hakkani-Tur

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If you want to publish experimental results with this dataset or use the baseline models, please cite the following article:

@article{kim2020domain,
  title={Beyond Domain APIs: Task-oriented Conversational Modeling with Unstructured Knowledge Access},
  author={Seokhwan Kim and Mihail Eric and Karthik Gopalakrishnan and Behnam Hedayatnia and Yang Liu and Dilek Hakkani-Tur},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2006.03533}
  year={2020}
}

NOTE: This paper reports the results with an earlier version of the dataset and the baseline models, which will differ from the baseline performances on the official challenge resources.

Tasks

This challenge track decouples between turns that could be handled by the existing task-oriented conversational models with no extra knowledge and turns that require external knowledge resources to be answered by the dialogue system. We focus on the turns that require knowledge access as the evaluation target in this track by the following three tasks:

Task #1Knowledge-seeking Turn Detection
GoalTo decide whether to continue the existing scenario or trigger the knowledge access branch for a given utterance and dialogue history
InputCurrent user utterance, Dialogue context, Knowledge snippets
OutputBinary class (requires knowledge access or not)
Task #2Knowledge Selection
GoalTo select proper knowledge sources from the domain knowledge-base given a dialogue state at each turn with knowledge access
InputCurrent user utterance, Dialogue context, Knowledge snippets
OutputRanked list of top-k knowledge candidates
Task #3Knowledge-grounded Response Generation
GoalTo take a triple of input utterance, dialog context, and the selected knowledge snippets and generate a system response
InputCurrent user utterance, Dialogue context, and Selected knowledge snippets
OutputGenerated system response

Participants will develop systems to generate the outputs for each task. They can leverage the annotations and the ground-truth responses available in the training and validation datasets.

In the test phase, participants will be given a set of unlabeled test instances. And they will submit up to 5 system outputs for all three tasks.

NOTE: For someone who are interested in only one or two of the tasks, we recommend to use our baseline system for the remaining tasks to complete the system outputs.

Evaluation

Each submission will be evaluated in the following task-specific automated metrics first:

TaskAutomated Metrics
Knowledge-seeking Turn DetectionPrecision/Recall/F-measure
Knowledge SelectionRecall@1, Recall@5, MRR@5
Knowledge-grounded Response GenerationBLEU, ROUGE, METEOR

To consider the dependencies between the tasks, the scores for knowledge selection and knowledge-grounded response generation are weighted by knowledge-seeking turn detection performances. Please find more details from scores.py.

The final ranking will be based on human evaluation results only for selected systems according to automated evaluation scores. It will address the following aspects: grammatical/semantical correctness, naturalness, appropriateness, informativeness and relevance to given knowledge.

Data

In this challenge track, participants will use an augmented version of MultiWoz 2.1 which includes newly introduced knowledge-seeking turns. All the ground-truth annotations for Knowledge-seeking Turn Detection and Knowledge Selection tasks as well as the agent's responses for Knowledge-grounded Response Generation task are available to develop the components on the training and validation sets. In addition, relevant knowledge snippets for each domain or entity are also provided in knowledge.json.

In the test phase, participants will be evaluated on the results generated by their models for two data sets: one is the unlabeled test set of the augmented MultiWoz 2.1, and the other is a new set of unseen conversations which are collected from scratch also including turns that require knowledge access. To evaluate the generalizability and the portability of each model, the unseen test set will be collected on different domains, entities and locales than MultiWoz.

Data and system output format details can be found from data/README.md.

Timeline

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Contact

Join the DSTC mailing list to get the latest updates about DSTC9

For specific enquiries about DSTC9 Track1

Please feel free to contact: seokhwk (at) amazon (dot) com