To Chat or Task: a Multi-turn Dialogue Generation Framework for Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems

Task-oriented dialogue systems employ natural language understanding (NLU) modules to manage the intricate and continually evolving business requirements of production systems.Although the development of Large Language Models (LLMs) introduced extraordinary chitchat capabilities, implementing LLMs into such systems brought new difficulties.One of the main challenges is the lack of specific datasets for training and evaluation of systems that offer both capabilities: chat and task.As NLU modules are designed to handle complex task requests and LLMs are utilized to specifically answer chitchat interactions, the system must correctly identify the functional intent of the user to utilize an applicable module.This paper presents CTFUSION, a multi-turn dialogue generation framework designed to assist the evaluation and training of production systems that offer both capabilities.Utilizing the framework, we generate a multi-turn dialogue dataset for an in-vehicle speech recognition system, which includes 41,211 dialogues of 240 real-world in-vehicle intents, and train In-vehicle Context Sensor (ICS), a lightweight model that successfully identifies the functional intent of the driver.ICS outperforms all baseline models across various experimental settings, which demonstrates that CTFUSION can help generate relevant datasets with a complex business logic, which can subsequently assist production systems in leveraging LLMs for their chitchat capabilities.