Traditional dialog state tracking is often formulated as a classification problem, where the dialog state is predicted as a distribution over a closed set of possible slot values within an ontology [1]. By doing so, the tracked dialog state which is a summary of current conversation, can be directly used for backend database querying or API calls in dialog system applications [2]. For example, a virtual assistant that helps users to book hotels, may fill a slot price_range with three possible values — high / low / intermediate defined by the query parameters of the backend hotel database. However, this classification
approach of dialog state tracking may have two main disadvantages. First, the system will not be able to handle any unseen values beyond the predefined value set. While building a classifier that covers all possible values will result in impractical annotation and training cost. Second, we see that many modern designed databases [3] and search engine API can take direct natural language input as the search query. A predefined value set will limit the user query space and cause the matched results lack of variety.
