HierTOD: A Task-Oriented Dialogue System Driven by Hierarchical Goals

TL;DR

HierTOD is an enterprise task-oriented dialogue system that uses hierarchical goals to support complex workflows, enabling proactive, goal-driven interactions and improving task completion in enterprise environments.

Contribution

The paper introduces HierTOD, a novel enterprise TOD system that integrates hierarchical goals and combines slot-filling with step-by-step guidance for complex task management.

Findings

HierTOD effectively supports composite workflows in enterprise settings.

User study shows improved task completion and user satisfaction.

System successfully unifies two TOD paradigms for enhanced flexibility.

Abstract

Task-Oriented Dialogue (TOD) systems assist users in completing tasks through natural language interactions, often relying on a single-layered workflow structure for slot-filling in public tasks, such as hotel bookings. However, in enterprise environments, which involve rich domain-specific knowledge, TOD systems face challenges due to task complexity and the lack of standardized documentation. In this work, we introduce HierTOD, an enterprise TOD system driven by hierarchical goals that can support composite workflows. By focusing on goal-driven interactions, our system serves a more proactive role, facilitating mixed-initiative dialogue and improving task completion. Equipped with components for natural language understanding, composite goal retriever, dialogue management, and response generation, backed by a well-organized data service with domain knowledge base and retrieval engine, HierTOD delivers efficient task assistance as judged by human evaluators. Furthermore, our system implementation unifies two TOD paradigms: slot-filling for information collection and step-by-step guidance for task execution. Our user study demonstrates the effectiveness and helpfulness of HierTOD in performing both paradigms.