Dynamic planning in open-ended dialogue using reinforcement learning

D Cohen, M Ryu, Y Chow, O Keller, I Greenberg… - arXiv preprint arXiv …, 2022 - arxiv.org
arXiv preprint arXiv:2208.02294, 2022arxiv.org
Despite recent advances in natural language understanding and generation, and decades
of research on the development of conversational bots, building automated agents that can
carry on rich open-ended conversations with humans" in the wild" remains a formidable
challenge. In this work we develop a real-time, open-ended dialogue system that uses
reinforcement learning (RL) to power a bot's conversational skill at scale. Our work pairs the
succinct embedding of the conversation state generated using SOTA (supervised) language …
Despite recent advances in natural language understanding and generation, and decades of research on the development of conversational bots, building automated agents that can carry on rich open-ended conversations with humans "in the wild" remains a formidable challenge. In this work we develop a real-time, open-ended dialogue system that uses reinforcement learning (RL) to power a bot's conversational skill at scale. Our work pairs the succinct embedding of the conversation state generated using SOTA (supervised) language models with RL techniques that are particularly suited to a dynamic action space that changes as the conversation progresses. Trained using crowd-sourced data, our novel system is able to substantially exceeds the (strong) baseline supervised model with respect to several metrics of interest in a live experiment with real users of the Google Assistant.
arxiv.org