HCLD: A Hierarchical Framework for Zero-shot Cross-lingual Dialogue System

AbstractRecently, many task-oriented dialogue systems need to serve users in different languages. However, it is time-consuming to collect enough data of each language for training. Thus, zero-shot adaptation of cross-lingual task-oriented dialog systems has been studied. Most of existing methods consider the word-level alignments to conduct two main tasks for task-oriented dialogue system, i.e., intent detection and slot filling, and they rarely explore the dependency relations among these two tasks. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical framework to classify the pre-defined intents in the high-level and fulfill slot filling under the guidance of intent in the low-level. Particularly, we incorporate sentence-level alignment among different languages to enhance the performance of intent detection. The extensive experiments report that our proposed method achieves the SOTA performance on a public task-oriented dialog dataset.