Task-oriented conversational agents rely on semantic parsers to translate natural language to formal representations. In this paper, we propose the design and rationale of the ThingTalk formal representation, and how the design improves the development of transactional task-oriented agents. ThingTalk is built on four core principles: (1) representing user requests directly as executable statements, covering all the functionality of the agent, (2) representing dialogues formally and succinctly to support accurate contextual semantic parsing, (3) standardizing types and interfaces to maximize reuse between agents, and (4) allowing multiple, independently-developed agents to be composed in a single virtual assistant. ThingTalk is developed as part of the Genie Framework that allows developers to quickly build transactional agents given a database and APIs. We compare ThingTalk to existing representations: SMCalFlow, SGD, TreeDST. Compared to the others, the ThingTalk design is both more general and more cost-effective. Evaluated on the MultiWOZ benchmark, using ThingTalk and associated tools yields a new state of the art accuracy of 79% turn-by-turn.

本文提出了一种基于四个核心原则的ThingTalk正式表示法，用于改善交易任务导向代理的开发，与现有表示法相比，ThingTalk设计更为通用且更具成本效益，使用ThingTalk和相关工具进行评估，可实现79％的逐轮新的状态艺术精度。

ThingTalk：一个任务导向对话的可扩展、可执行表示语言