Recently, data-driven task-oriented dialogue systems have achieved promising
performance in English. However, developing dialogue systems that support
low-resource languages remains a long-standing challenge due to the absence of
high-quality data. In order to circumvent the expensive and time-consuming data
collection, we introduce Attention-Informed Mixed-Language Training (MLT), a
novel zero-shot adaptation method for cross-lingual task-oriented dialogue
systems. It leverages very few task-related parallel word pairs to generate
code-switching sentences for learning the inter-lingual semantics across
languages. Instead of manually selecting the word pairs, we propose to extract
source words based on the scores computed by the attention layer of a trained
English task-related model and then generate word pairs using existing
bilingual dictionaries. Furthermore, intensive experiments with different
cross-lingual embeddings demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.
Finally, with very few word pairs, our model achieves significant zero-shot
adaptation performance improvements in both cross-lingual dialogue state
tracking and natural language understanding (i.e., intent detection and slot
filling) tasks compared to the current state-of-the-art approaches, which
utilize a much larger amount of bilingual data.

该研究提出了 Attention-Informed Mixed-Language Training (MLT) 方法，用于跨语种任务定向对话系统的零样本适应。该方法通过利用极少的任务相关平行词对来生成代码交换句子，并利用注意层给出的分数提取源单词，最终实现了显著的零 - shot 适应性能提升。