Reinforcement Learning for Adaptive Dialogue Systems

Professor Oliver Lemon leads the Interaction Lab in the School of Mathematical and Computer Sciences (MACS) at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh. He previously worked at the School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, and at Stanford University. His main expertise is in the area of machine learning methods for intelligent and adaptive multimodal interfaces, including work on Speech Recognition, Spoken Language Understanding, Dialogue Management, and Natural Language Generation. He applies this work in new interfaces for mobile search, virtual characters, Technology Enhanced Learning, and Human-Robot Interaction, in a variety of international research projects. Dr Verena Rieser is a Lecturer in Computer Science at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh. She previously worked at Edinburgh University in the Schools of Informatics and GeoSciences, performing research in data-driven statistical methods for multimodal interfaces, as well as for modelling impacts of environmental change for sustainable development. She received her PhD (with distinction) from Saarland University in 2008, winning the Eduard-Martin prize.

1.Introduction.- 2.Background.- 3.Reinforcement Learning for Information Seeking dialogue strategies.- 4.The bootstrapping approach to developing Reinforcement Learning-based strategies.- 5.Data Collection in aWizard-of-Oz experiment.- 6.Building a simulated learning environment from Wizard-of-Oz data.- 7.Comparing Reinforcement and Supervised Learning of dialogue policies with real users.- 8.Meta-evaluation.- 9.Adaptive Natural Language Generation.- 10.Conclusion.- References.- Example Dialogues.- A.1.Wizard-of-Oz Example Dialogues.- A.2.Example Dialogues from Simulated Interaction.- A.3.Example Dialogues from User Testing.- Learned State-Action Mappings.- Index.