Sub-domain Modelling for Dialogue Management with Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning

Paweł Budzianowski, Stefan Ultes, Pei-Hao Su, Nikola Mrkšić, Tsung-Hsien Wen, Iñigo Casanueva, Lina M. Rojas-Barahona, Milica Gašić


Abstract
Human conversation is inherently complex, often spanning many different topics/domains. This makes policy learning for dialogue systems very challenging. Standard flat reinforcement learning methods do not provide an efficient framework for modelling such dialogues. In this paper, we focus on the under-explored problem of multi-domain dialogue management. First, we propose a new method for hierarchical reinforcement learning using the option framework. Next, we show that the proposed architecture learns faster and arrives at a better policy than the existing flat ones do. Moreover, we show how pretrained policies can be adapted to more complex systems with an additional set of new actions. In doing that, we show that our approach has the potential to facilitate policy optimisation for more sophisticated multi-domain dialogue systems.
Anthology ID:
W17-5512
Volume:
Proceedings of the 18th Annual SIGdial Meeting on Discourse and Dialogue
Month:
August
Year:
2017
Address:
Saarbrücken, Germany
Editors:
Kristiina Jokinen, Manfred Stede, David DeVault, Annie Louis
Venue:
SIGDIAL
SIG:
SIGDIAL
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
86–92
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W17-5512
DOI:
10.18653/v1/W17-5512
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Paweł Budzianowski, Stefan Ultes, Pei-Hao Su, Nikola Mrkšić, Tsung-Hsien Wen, Iñigo Casanueva, Lina M. Rojas-Barahona, and Milica Gašić. 2017. Sub-domain Modelling for Dialogue Management with Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning. In Proceedings of the 18th Annual SIGdial Meeting on Discourse and Dialogue, pages 86–92, Saarbrücken, Germany. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Sub-domain Modelling for Dialogue Management with Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (Budzianowski et al., SIGDIAL 2017)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/W17-5512.pdf