CoDial: Interpretable Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems Through Dialogue Flow Alignment

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2506.02264v1
• Date: Mon, 02 Jun 2025 21:12:27 GMT
• Title: CoDial: Interpretable Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems Through Dialogue Flow Alignment
• Authors: Radin Shayanfar, Chu Fei Luo, Rohan Bhambhoria, Samuel Dahan, Xiaodan Zhu,
• Abstract summary: We introduce a novel framework, CoDial, that converts expert knowledge into executable conversation logic.<n>CoDial can be easily implemented in existing guardrailing languages, such as Colang.<n>It achieves state-of-the-art performance on the STAR dataset for inference-based models and is competitive with similar baselines on the well-known MultiWOZ dataset.
• Score: 24.936670177298584
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: It is often challenging to teach specialized, unseen tasks to dialogue systems due to the high cost of expert knowledge, training data, and high technical difficulty. To support domain-specific applications - such as law, medicine, or finance - it is essential to build frameworks that enable non-technical experts to define, test, and refine system behaviour with minimal effort. Achieving this requires cross-disciplinary collaboration between developers and domain specialists. In this work, we introduce a novel framework, CoDial (Code for Dialogue), that converts expert knowledge, represented as a novel structured heterogeneous graph, into executable conversation logic. CoDial can be easily implemented in existing guardrailing languages, such as Colang, to enable interpretable, modifiable, and true zero-shot specification of task-oriented dialogue systems. Empirically, CoDial achieves state-of-the-art performance on the STAR dataset for inference-based models and is competitive with similar baselines on the well-known MultiWOZ dataset. We also demonstrate CoDial's iterative improvement via manual and LLM-aided feedback, making it a practical tool for expert-guided alignment of LLMs in high-stakes domains.

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