A Perspective on Anchoring and Dialogue History Propagation for Smoother Interactions with Spoken Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems (2023)

Abstract: Task-Oriented Dialogue (TOD) systems provide interactive assistance to a user in order to accomplish a specific task such as making a reservation at a restaurant or booking a room in a hotel. Speech presents itself as a natural interface for TOD systems. A typical approach to implement them is to use a modular architecture (Gao et al., 2018). A core component of such dialogue systems is Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) whose goal is to extract the relevant information from the user’s utterances. While spoken dialogue was the focus of earlier work (Williams et al., 2013; Henderson et al., 2014), recent work has focused on text inputs with no regard for the specificities of spoken language (Wu et al., 2019; Heck et al., 2020; Feng et al., 2021). However, this approach fails to account for the differences between written and spoken language (Faruqui and Hakkani-Tür, 2022) such as disfluencies. My research focuses on Spoken Language Understanding in the context of Task-Oriented Dialogue. More specifically I am interested in the two following research directions: • Annotation schema for spoken TODs, • Integration of dialogue history for contextually coherent predictions.

## research interests task-oriented dialogue (tod) systems provide interactive assistance to a user in order to accomplish a specific task such as making a reservation at a restaurant or booking a room in a hotel. speech presents itself as a natural interface for tod systems. a typical approach to implement them is to use a modular architecture @xcite . a core component of such dialogue systems is spoken language understanding (slu) whose goal is to extract the relevant information from the user's utterances. while spoken dialogue was the focus of earlier work @xcite , recent work has focused on text inputs with no regard for the specificities of spoken language @xcite @xcite . however, this approach fails to account for the differences between written and spoken language @xcite ) such as disfluencies. my research focuses on spoken language understanding in the context of task-oriented dialogue. more specifically i am interested in the two following research directions: ## sds research the spoken dialogue system field is moving at an incredibly fast pace and the gap between research and deployment is narrowing. therefore i believe future research will have to rely on more realistic datasets. finally evaluating the impact of sds components on the completion of the targeted task seems to be a promising and mandatory research path. ## suggested topics for discussion in a broader discussion i believe the following topics might be interesting to discuss: