Technology Overview and Data Flow Chart.
Goal-oriented dialogue systems is a category of dialogue systems designed to solve one or multiple specific goals or tasks (e.g. flight reservation, hotel reservation, food ordering, appointment scheduling). Traditionally, goal-oriented dialogue systems are set up as a pipeline with four main modules: 1-Natural Language Understanding (NLU), 2-Dialogue State Tracking (DST), 3-Dialog Policy Manager, and 4-Response Generator.
NLU extracts the semantic information from each dialogue turn which includes e.g. user intents and slot values mentioned by the user or system. DST takes the extracted entities to build the state of the user goal by aggregating and tracking the information across all turns of the dialogue. Dialog Policy Manager is responsible for deciding the next action of the system based on the current state. Finally, Response Generator converts the system action into human natural text understandable by the user.