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

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

ACL 2023 |

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.