Existing pipelined task-oriented dialogue systems usually have difficulties adapting to unseen domains, whereas end-to-end systems are plagued by large-scale knowledge bases in practice. In this paper, we introduce a novel query-driven task-oriented dialogue system, namely Q-TOD. The essential information from the dialogue context is extracted into a query, which is further employed to retrieve relevant knowledge records for response generation. Firstly, as the query is in the form of natural language and not confined to the schema of the knowledge base, the issue of domain adaption is alleviated remarkably in Q-TOD. Secondly, as the query enables the decoupling of knowledge retrieval from the generation, Q-TOD gets rid of the issue of knowledge base scalability. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed Q-TOD, we collect query annotations for three publicly available task-oriented dialogue datasets. Comprehensive experiments verify that Q-TOD outperforms strong baselines and establishes a new state-of-the-art performance on these datasets.

本文介绍了一种新的基于查询驱动的任务对话系统，即Q-TOD，该系统可将对话上下文的关键信息提取为查询，进而用于检索相关的知识记录以形成响应生成，它能够显著缓解领域适应性和知识库可扩展性的问题，实验结果表明，Q-TOD优于现有系统并在公开数据集上取得了最新的最佳表现。

Q-TOD: 基于查询的任务导向对话系统