End-to-end Task-oriented Dialogue: A Survey of Tasks, Methods, and Future Directions (2023)

Abstract: End-to-end task-oriented dialogue (EToD) can directly generate responses in an end-to-end fashion without modular training, which attracts escalating popularity. The advancement of deep neural networks, especially the successful use of large pre-trained models, has further led to significant progress in EToD research in recent years. In this paper, we present a thorough review and provide a unified perspective to summarize existing approaches as well as recent trends to advance the development of EToD research. The contributions of this paper can be summarized: (1) First survey: to our knowledge, we take the first step to present a thorough survey of this research field; (2) New taxonomy: we first introduce a unified perspective for EToD, including (i) Modularly EToD and (ii) Fully EToD; (3) New Frontiers: we discuss some potential frontier areas as well as the corresponding challenges, hoping to spur breakthrough research in EToD field; (4) Abundant resources: we build a public website, where EToD researchers could directly access the recent progress. We hope this work can serve as a thorough reference for the EToD research community.

## introduction task-oriented dialogue systems (tod) can assist users in achieving particular goals with natural language interaction such as booking a restaurant or navigation inquiry. this area is seeing growing interest in both academic research and indus- ## background this section describes the definition of modularly end-to-end task-oriented dialogue (modularly etod §2.1) and fully end-to-end task-oriented dialogue (fully etod §2.2), respectively. ## future directions this section will discuss new frontiers for etod, hoping to facilitate follow-up research in this field. ## conclusion we made a first attempt to summarize the progress of end-to-end task-oriented dialogue systems (etod) by introducing a new perspective of recent work, including modularly etod and fully etod. in addition, we discussed some new trends as well as their challenges in this research field, hoping to attract more breakthroughs on future research.