Learning Goal-oriented Dialogue Policy with opposite Agent Awareness

Zheng Zhang, Lizi Liao, Xiaoyan Zhu, Tat-Seng Chua, Zitao Liu, Yan Huang, Minlie Huang


Abstract
Most existing approaches for goal-oriented dialogue policy learning used reinforcement learning, which focuses on the target agent policy and simply treats the opposite agent policy as part of the environment. While in real-world scenarios, the behavior of an opposite agent often exhibits certain patterns or underlies hidden policies, which can be inferred and utilized by the target agent to facilitate its own decision making. This strategy is common in human mental simulation by first imaging a specific action and the probable results before really acting it. We therefore propose an opposite behavior aware framework for policy learning in goal-oriented dialogues. We estimate the opposite agent’s policy from its behavior and use this estimation to improve the target agent by regarding it as part of the target policy. We evaluate our model on both cooperative and competitive dialogue tasks, showing superior performance over state-of-the-art baselines.
Anthology ID:
2020.aacl-main.16
Volume:
Proceedings of the 1st Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 10th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing
Month:
December
Year:
2020
Address:
Suzhou, China
Editors:
Kam-Fai Wong, Kevin Knight, Hua Wu
Venue:
AACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
122–132
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.aacl-main.16
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zheng Zhang, Lizi Liao, Xiaoyan Zhu, Tat-Seng Chua, Zitao Liu, Yan Huang, and Minlie Huang. 2020. Learning Goal-oriented Dialogue Policy with opposite Agent Awareness. In Proceedings of the 1st Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 10th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing, pages 122–132, Suzhou, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Learning Goal-oriented Dialogue Policy with opposite Agent Awareness (Zhang et al., AACL 2020)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.aacl-main.16.pdf
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MultiWOZ