DSTEA: Dialogue State Tracking with Entity Adaptive Pre-training

Dialogue state tracking (DST) is a core sub-module of a dialogue system, which aims to extract the appropriate belief state (domain-slot-value) from a system and user utterances. Most previous studies have attempted to improve performance by increasing the size of the pre-trained model or using additional features such as graph relations. In this study, we propose dialogue state tracking with entity adaptive pre-training (DSTEA), a system in which key entities in a sentence are more intensively trained by the encoder of the DST model. DSTEA extracts important entities from input dialogues in four ways, and then applies selective knowledge masking to train the model effectively. Although DSTEA conducts only pre-training without directly infusing additional knowledge to the DST model, it achieved better performance than the best-known benchmark models on MultiWOZ 2.0, 2.1, and 2.2. The effectiveness of DSTEA was verified through various comparative experiments with regard to the entity type and different adaptive settings.