Despite the surging demands for multilingual task-oriented dialog systems (e.g., Alexa, Google Home), there has been less research done in multilingual or cross-lingual scenarios. Hence, we propose a zero-shot adaptation of task-oriented dialogue system to low-resource languages. To tackle this challenge, we first use a set of very few parallel word pairs to refine the aligned cross-lingual word-level representations. We then employ a latent variable model to cope with the variance of similar sentences across different languages, which is induced by imperfect cross-lingual alignments and inherent differences in languages. Finally, the experimental results show that even though we utilize much less external resources, our model achieves better adaptation performance for natural language understanding task (i.e., the intent detection and slot filling) compared to the current state-of-the-art model in the zero-shot scenario.

本文针对零资源的多语言任务导向对话系统进行零样本自适应的提出，使用极少量的平行语词来优化对齐的跨语言词级表示，并采用潜变量模型处理不同语言间类似句子的变化，实验表明，我们的模型在零样本情况下对自然语言理解任务的适应性优于当前最先进的模型。

可转移潜变量的零-shot跨语言对话系统