English

Guided Dialog Policy Learning: Reward Estimation for Multi-Domain Task-Oriented Dialog

Computation and Language 2019-08-29 v1 Machine Learning

Abstract

Dialog policy decides what and how a task-oriented dialog system will respond, and plays a vital role in delivering effective conversations. Many studies apply Reinforcement Learning to learn a dialog policy with the reward function which requires elaborate design and pre-specified user goals. With the growing needs to handle complex goals across multiple domains, such manually designed reward functions are not affordable to deal with the complexity of real-world tasks. To this end, we propose Guided Dialog Policy Learning, a novel algorithm based on Adversarial Inverse Reinforcement Learning for joint reward estimation and policy optimization in multi-domain task-oriented dialog. The proposed approach estimates the reward signal and infers the user goal in the dialog sessions. The reward estimator evaluates the state-action pairs so that it can guide the dialog policy at each dialog turn. Extensive experiments on a multi-domain dialog dataset show that the dialog policy guided by the learned reward function achieves remarkably higher task success than state-of-the-art baselines.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1908.10719,
  title  = {Guided Dialog Policy Learning: Reward Estimation for Multi-Domain Task-Oriented Dialog},
  author = {Ryuichi Takanobu and Hanlin Zhu and Minlie Huang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1908.10719},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

EMNLP 2019 long paper

R2 v1 2026-06-23T10:58:59.503Z