Improving Generalization in Task-oriented Dialogues with Workflows and
  Action Plans
Stefania Raimondo Christopher Pal Xiaotian Liu David Vazquez Hector Palacios
Task-oriented dialogue is difficult in part because it involves understanding
user intent, collecting information from the user, executing API calls, and
generating helpful and fluent responses. However, for complex tasks one must
also correctly do all of these things over multiple steps, and in a specific
order. While large pre-trained language models can be fine-tuned end-to-end to
create multi-step task-oriented dialogue agents that generate fluent text, our
experiments confirm that this approach alone cannot reliably perform new
multi-step tasks that are unseen during training. To address these limitations,
we augment the dialogue contexts given to \textmd{text2text} transformers with
known \textit{valid workflow names} and \textit{action plans}. Action plans
consist of sequences of actions required to accomplish a task, and are encoded
as simple sequences of keywords (e.g. verify-identity, pull-up-account,
reset-password, etc.). We perform extensive experiments on the Action-Based
Conversations Dataset (ABCD) with T5-small, base and large models, and show
that such models: a) are able to more readily generalize to unseen workflows by
following the provided plan, and b) are able to generalize to executing unseen
actions if they are provided in the plan. In contrast, models are unable to
fully accomplish new multi-step tasks when they are not provided action plan
information, even when given new valid workflow names.