  Zero-shot Dialogue State Tracking (DST) addresses the challenge of acquiring
and annotating task-oriented dialogues, which can be time-consuming and costly.
However, DST extends beyond simple slot-filling and requires effective updating
strategies for tracking dialogue state as conversations progress. In this
paper, we propose ParsingDST, a new In-Context Learning (ICL) method, to
introduce additional intricate updating strategies in zero-shot DST. Our
approach reformulates the DST task by leveraging powerful Large Language Models
(LLMs) and translating the original dialogue text to JSON through semantic
parsing as an intermediate state. We also design a novel framework that
includes more modules to ensure the effectiveness of updating strategies in the
text-to-JSON process. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach
outperforms existing zero-shot DST methods on MultiWOZ, exhibiting significant
improvements in Joint Goal Accuracy (JGA) and slot accuracy compared to
existing ICL methods. Our code has been released.
