A generalized rule based tracker for dialogue state tracking

Dialogue state tracking plays an important role in statistical dialogue management. Domain-independent rule-based approaches are attractive due to their efficiency, portability and interpretability. However, recent rule-based models are still not quite competitive to statistical tracking approaches. In this paper, a novel framework is proposed to formulate rule-based models in a general way. In the framework, a rule is considered as a special kind of polynomial function satisfying certain linear constraints. Under some particular definitions and assumptions, rule-based models can be seen as feasible solutions of an integer linear programming problem. Experiments showed that the proposed approach can not only achieve competitive performance compared to statistical approaches, but also have good generalisation ability. It is one of the only two entries that outperformed all the four baselines in the third Dialog State Tracking Challenge.