@inproceedings{aksu-etal-2023-prompter,
    title = "Prompter: Zero-shot Adaptive Prefixes for Dialogue State Tracking Domain Adaptation",
    author = "Aksu, Ibrahim Taha  and
      Kan, Min-Yen  and
      Chen, Nancy",
    editor = "Rogers, Anna  and
      Boyd-Graber, Jordan  and
      Okazaki, Naoaki",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
    month = jul,
    year = "2023",
    address = "Toronto, Canada",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.252",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2023.acl-long.252",
    pages = "4588--4603",
    abstract = "A challenge in the Dialogue State Tracking (DST) field is adapting models to new domains without using any supervised data {---} zero-shot domain adaptation. Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning (PETL) has the potential to address this problem due to its robustness. However, it has yet to be applied to the zero-shot scenarios, as it is not clear how to apply it unsupervisedly. Our method, Prompter, uses descriptions of target domain slots to generate dynamic prefixes that are concatenated to the key and values at each layer{'}s self-attention mechanism. This allows for the use of prefix-tuning in zero-shot. Prompter outperforms previous methods on both the MultiWOZ and SGD benchmarks. In generating prefixes, our analyses find that Prompter not only utilizes the semantics of slot descriptions but also how often the slots appear together in conversation. Moreover, Prompter{'}s gains are due to its improved ability to distinguish {''}none{''}-valued dialogue slots, compared against baselines.",
}

A challenge in the Dialogue State Tracking (DST) field is adapting models to new domains without using any supervised data {---} zero-shot domain adaptation. Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning (PETL) has the potential to address this problem due to its robustness. However, it has yet to be applied to the zero-shot scenarios, as it is not clear how to apply it unsupervisedly. Our method, Prompter, uses descriptions of target domain slots to generate dynamic prefixes that are concatenated to the key and values at each layer{'}s self-attention mechanism. This allows for the use of prefix-tuning in zero-shot. Prompter outperforms previous methods on both the MultiWOZ and SGD benchmarks. In generating prefixes, our analyses find that Prompter not only utilizes the semantics of slot descriptions but also how often the slots appear together in conversation. Moreover, Prompter{'}s gains are due to its improved ability to distinguish {''}none{''}-valued dialogue slots, compared against baselines.
Aksu, Ibrahim Taha Kan, Min-Yen Chen, Nancy
Prompter: Zero-shot Adaptive Prefixes for Dialogue State Tracking Domain Adaptation