Are Current Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems Able to Satisfy Impolite Users?

Task-oriented dialogue (TOD) systems play a critical role in assisting users with various tasks, such as ticket booking and service inquiries. While these systems have demonstrated significant potential in addressing customer needs, they typically assume that users will interact with the dialogue agent in a polite manner. This assumption, however, is often unrealistic, as users may express impatience or frustration through impolite behavior. Addressing this gap, this article investigates the impact of impolite user behavior on the performance of TOD systems. To this end, we developed a novel corpus of impolite dialogues and conducted comprehensive experiments to evaluate the performance of state-of-the-art TOD systems on this dataset. Our results reveal a notable limitation: existing TOD systems struggle to handle impolite user utterances effectively, leading to degraded performance. To mitigate this issue, we introduce a data augmentation approach designed to improve the systems’ ability to manage impolite dialogues. Although this method achieves measurable improvements, managing impolite user interactions remains a challenging research problem. By making our impolite dialogue corpus publicly accessible, we aim to encourage further research in this underexplored area. This study underscores the need for more robust TOD systems capable of handling diverse user behaviors, ultimately enhancing their applicability in real-world scenarios.