This is code for the paper "Improving End-to-End Task-Oriented Dialogue System with A Simple Auxiliary Task".

To download data.zip properly, git lfs(Large File Storage) extension must be installed.

# clone repository as usual
git clone https://github.com/bepoetree/MTTOD.git
cd MTTOD
# check file size of data.zip
ls -l data.zip
# unzip
unzip data.zip -d data/

# The file size of data.zip is about 52 MB. If not, git-lfs is not installed or failed to checked out correctly.
# please ensure to install git-lfs (in Ubuntu or Debian, execute "apt install git-lfs" with sudo) in your system.
# After then, Retrying LFS checkout with the following commands:
git lfs install
git lfs pull
git checkout -f HEAD

Our python version is 3.6.9.

The package can be installed by running the following command.

pip install -r requirements.txt
python -m spacy download en_core_web_sm

For the experiments, we use MultiWOZ2.0 and MultiWOZ2.1.

• (MultiWOZ2.0) annotated_user_da_with_span_full.json: A fully annotated version of the original MultiWOZ2.0 data released by developers of Convlab available here.
• (MultiWOZ2.1) data.json: The original MultiWOZ 2.1 data released by researchers in University of Cambrige available here.
• (MultiWOZ2.2) data.json: The MultiWOZ2.2 dataset converted to the same format as MultiWOZ2.1 using script here.

We use the preprocessing scripts implemented by Zhang et al., 2020. Please refer to here for the details.

python preprocess.py -version $VERSION

Our implementation supports a single GPU. Please use smaller batch sizes if out-of-memory error raises.

• MTTOD without auxiliary task (for the ablation)

python main.py -version $VERSION -run_type train -model_dir $MODEL_DIR

• MTTOD with auxiliary task

python main.py -version $VERSION -run_type train -model_dir $MODEL_DIR -add_auxiliary_task

The checkpoints will be saved at the end of each epoch (the default training epoch is set to 10).

python main.py -run_type predict -ckpt $CHECKPOINT -output $MODEL_OUTPUT -batch_size $BATCH_SIZE

All checkpoints are saved in $MODEL_DIR with names such as 'ckpt-epoch10'.

The result file ($MODEL_OUTPUT) will be saved in the checkpoint directory.

To reduce inference time, it is recommended to set large $BATCH_SIZE. In our experiemnts, it is set to 16 for inference.

You can download our trained model here.

We use the evaluation scripts implemented by Zhang et al., 2020.

python evaluator.py -data $CHECKPOINT/$MODEL_OUTPUT

For the MultiWOZ benchmark, we recommend to use standardized evaluation script.

# MultiWOZ2.2 is used for the benchmark (MultiWOZ2.2 should be preprocessed prior to this step)
python main.py -run_type predict -ckpt $CHECKPOINT -output $MODEL_OUTPUT -batch_size $BATCH_SIZE -version 2.2
# convert format for the the standardized evaluation
python convert.py -input $CHECKPOINT/$MODEL_OUTPUT -output $CONVERTED_MODEL_OUTPUT

# clone the standardized evaluation repository
git clone https://github.com/Tomiinek/MultiWOZ_Evaluation
cd MultiWOZ_Evaluation
pip install -r requirements.txt

# do standardized evaluation
python evaluate.py -i $CONVERTED_MODEL_OUTPUT -b -s -r

This code is based on the released code (https://github.com/thu-spmi/damd-multiwoz/) for "Task-Oriented Dialog Systems that Consider Multiple Appropriate Responses under the Same Context", which distributed under Apache License Version 2.0. Copyright 2019- Yichi Zhang.

For the pre-trained language model, we use huggingface's Transformer (https://huggingface.co/transformers/index.html#), which distributed under Apache License Version 2.0. Copyright 2018- The Hugging Face team. All rights reserved.

We are grateful for their excellent works.