End-to-End Learning of Flowchart Grounded Task-Oriented Dialogs

We propose a novel problem within end-toend learning of task oriented dialogs (TOD), in which the dialog system mimics a troubleshooting agent who helps a user by diagnosing their problem (e.g., car not starting). Such dialogs are grounded in domain-specific flowcharts, which the agent is supposed to follow during the conversation. Our task exposes novel technical challenges for neural TOD, such as grounding an utterance to the flowchart without explicit annotation, referring to additional manual pages when user asks a clarification question, and ability to follow unseen flowcharts at test time. We release a dataset (FLODIAL) consisting of 2,738 dialogs grounded on 12 different troubleshooting flowcharts. We also design a neural model, FLONET, which uses a retrieval-augmented generation architecture to train the dialog agent. Our experiments find that FLONET can do zero-shot transfer to unseen flowcharts, and sets a strong baseline for future research. * D. Raghu and S.Agarwal contributed equally to this work. † D. Raghu is an employee at IBM Research. This work was carried out as part of PhD research at IIT Delhi. N3 N2 N1 My Acura ILX is not starting. When I turn the key, the starter doesn't spin. This happened yesterday too and I missed an important appointment Does the voltage of your car battery read more than 12? How do I check the car battery voltage? You can check the car battery voltage using a voltmeter How do I read battery voltage using a voltmeter? In order to get a measurement, touch the black negative probe of the voltmeter to the battery's black … The battery does not read more than 12. Your battery is dead (for now). Find someone to help you jump start your car. This should be a quick fix. I have a friend who can help with that. Thanks for the tip. I'm glad to be of help. Have a good day! (c) Example dialog grounded on flowchart and support documents Starter cranks? Battery read over 12V? Starter spins? Jump start the car