X-RiSAWOZ: High-Quality End-to-End Multilingual Dialogue Datasets and Few-shot Agents

Mehrad Moradshahi, Tianhao Shen, Kalika Bali, Monojit Choudhury, Gael de Chalendar, Anmol Goel, Sungkyun Kim, Prashant Kodali, Ponnurangam Kumaraguru, Nasredine Semmar, Sina Semnani, Jiwon Seo, Vivek Seshadri, Manish Shrivastava, Michael Sun, Aditya Yadavalli, Chaobin You, Deyi Xiong, Monica S Lam

Findings: Multilingualism and Cross-Lingual NLP Findings Paper

Session 4: Multilingualism and Cross-Lingual NLP (Virtual Poster)
Conference Room: Pier 7&8
Conference Time: July 11, 11:00-12:30 (EDT) (America/Toronto)
Global Time: July 11, Session 4 (15:00-16:30 UTC)
Spotlight Session: Spotlight - Metropolitan West (Spotlight)
Conference Room: Metropolitan West
Conference Time: July 10, 19:00-21:00 (EDT) (America/Toronto)
Global Time: July 10, Spotlight Session (23:00-01:00 UTC)
Keywords: code-switching, mixed language, multilingualism, cross-lingual transfer, multilingual pre-training, multilingual benchmarks, multilingual evaluation
Languages: chinese, french, hindi
TLDR: Task-oriented dialogue research has mainly focused on a few popular languages like English and Chinese, due to the high dataset creation cost for a new language. To reduce the cost, we apply manual editing to automatically translated data. We create a new multilingual benchmark, X-RiSAWOZ, by trans...
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Abstract: Task-oriented dialogue research has mainly focused on a few popular languages like English and Chinese, due to the high dataset creation cost for a new language. To reduce the cost, we apply manual editing to automatically translated data. We create a new multilingual benchmark, X-RiSAWOZ, by translating the Chinese RiSAWOZ to 4 languages: English, French, Hindi, Korean; and a code-mixed English-Hindi language. X-RiSAWOZ has more than 18,000 human-verified dialogue utterances for each language, and unlike most multilingual prior work, is an end-to-end dataset for building fully-functioning agents. The many difficulties we encountered in creating X-RiSAWOZ led us to develop a toolset to accelerate the post-editing of a new language dataset after translation. This toolset improves machine translation with a hybrid entity alignment technique that combines neural with dictionary-based methods, along with many automated and semi-automated validation checks. We establish strong baselines for X-RiSAWOZ by training dialogue agents in the zero- and few-shot settings where limited gold data is available in the target language. Our results suggest that our translation and post-editing methodology and toolset can be used to create new high-quality multilingual dialogue agents cost-effectively. Our dataset, code, and toolkit are released open-source.