Attention-based pre-trained language models such as GPT-2 brought considerable progress to end-to-end dialogue modelling. However, they also present considerable risks for taskoriented dialogue, such as lack of knowledge grounding or diversity. To address these issues, we introduce modified training objectives for language model finetuning, and we employ massive data augmentation via backtranslation to increase the diversity of the training data. We further examine the possibilities of combining data from multiples sources to improve performance on the target dataset. We carefully evaluate our contributions with both human and automatic methods. Our model substantially outperforms the baseline on the MultiWOZ data and shows competitive performance with state of the art in both automatic and human evaluation.

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