Are LLMs Robust for Spoken Dialogues?
Seyed Mahed Mousavi Gabriel Roccabruna Simone Alghisi Massimo Rizzoli Mirco Ravanelli Giuseppe Riccardi
Large Pre-Trained Language Models have demonstrated state-of-the-art
performance in different downstream tasks, including dialogue state tracking
and end-to-end response generation. Nevertheless, most of the publicly
available datasets and benchmarks on task-oriented dialogues focus on written
conversations. Consequently, the robustness of the developed models to spoken
interactions is unknown. In this work, we have evaluated the performance of
LLMs for spoken task-oriented dialogues on the DSTC11 test sets. Due to the
lack of proper spoken dialogue datasets, we have automatically transcribed a
development set of spoken dialogues with a state-of-the-art ASR engine. We have
characterized the ASR-error types and their distributions and simulated these
errors in a large dataset of dialogues. We report the intrinsic (perplexity)
and extrinsic (human evaluation) performance of fine-tuned GPT-2 and T5 models
in two subtasks of response generation and dialogue state tracking,
respectively. The results show that LLMs are not robust to spoken noise by
default, however, fine-tuning/training such models on a proper dataset of
spoken TODs can result in a more robust performance.