HierTOD: A Task-Oriented Dialogue System Driven by Hierarchical Goals
Lingbo Mo, Shun Jiang, Akash Maharaj, Bernard Hishamunda, Yunyao Li

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,…
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Taxonomy
TopicsSpeech and dialogue systems · Multi-Agent Systems and Negotiation · Topic Modeling
Methodstravel james · Balanced Selection
