A zero-shot approach for multi-user task-oriented dialog generation

Prior art investigating task-oriented dialog and automatic generation of such dialogs have focused on single-user dialogs between a single user and an agent. However, there is limited study on adapting such AI agents to multiuser conversations (involving multiple users and an agent). Multi-user conversations are richer than single-user conversations containing social banter and collaborative decision making. The most significant challenge impeding such studies is the lack of suitable multiuser task-oriented dialogs with annotations of user belief states and system actions. One potential solution is multi-user dialog generation from single-user data. Many single-user dialogs datasets already contain dialog state information (intents, slots), thus making them suitable candidates. In this work, we propose a novel approach for expanding single-user taskoriented dialogs (e.g. MultiWOZ) to multiuser dialogs in a zero-shot setting.