Survey on Evaluation Methods for Dialogue Systems

In this paper we survey the methods and concepts developed for the evaluation of dialogue systems. Evaluation is a crucial part during the development process. Often, dialogue systems are evaluated by means of human evaluations and questionnaires. However, this tends to be very cost and time intensive. Thus, much work has been put into finding methods, which allow to reduce the involvement of human labour. In this survey, we present the main concepts and methods. For this, we differentiate between the various classes of dialogue systems (task-oriented dialogue systems, conversational dialogue systems, and question-answering dialogue systems). We cover each class by introducing the main technologies developed for the dialogue systems and then by presenting the evaluation methods regarding this class

End-to-end optimization of goal-driven and visually grounded dialogue systems

End-to-end design of dialogue systems has recently become a popular research topic thanks to powerful tools such as encoder-decoder architectures for sequence-to-sequence learning. Yet, most current approaches cast human-machine dialogue management as a supervised learning problem, aiming at predicting the next utterance of a participant given the full history of the dialogue. This vision is too simplistic to render the intrinsic planning problem inherent to dialogue as well as its grounded nature, making the context of a dialogue larger than the sole history. This is why only chit-chat and question answering tasks have been addressed so far using end-to-end architectures. In this paper, we introduce a Deep Reinforcement Learning method to optimize visually grounded task-oriented dialogues, based on the policy gradient algorithm. This approach is tested on a dataset of 120k dialogues collected through Mechanical Turk and provides encouraging results at solving both the problem of generating natural dialogues and the task of discovering a specific object in a complex picture

Learning dialogue POMDP model components from expert dialogues

Un système de dialogue conversationnel doit aider les utilisateurs humains à atteindre leurs objectifs à travers des dialogues naturels et efficients. C'est une tache toutefois difficile car les langages naturels sont ambiguës et incertains, de plus le système de reconnaissance vocale (ASR) est bruité. À cela s'ajoute le fait que l'utilisateur humain peut changer son intention lors de l'interaction avec la machine. Dans ce contexte, l'application des processus décisionnels de Markov partiellement observables (POMDPs) au système de dialogue conversationnel nous a permis d'avoir un cadre formel pour représenter explicitement les incertitudes, et automatiser la politique d'optimisation. L'estimation des composantes du modelé d'un POMDP-dialogue constitue donc un défi important, car une telle estimation a un impact direct sur la politique d'optimisation du POMDP-dialogue. Cette thèse propose des méthodes d'apprentissage des composantes d'un POMDPdialogue basées sur des dialogues bruités et sans annotation. Pour cela, nous présentons des méthodes pour apprendre les intentions possibles des utilisateurs à partir des dialogues, en vue de les utiliser comme états du POMDP-dialogue, et l'apprendre un modèle du maximum de vraisemblance à partir des données, pour transition du POMDP. Car c'est crucial de réduire la taille d'état d'observation, nous proposons également deux modèles d'observation: le modelé mot-clé et le modelé intention. Dans les deux modèles, le nombre d'observations est réduit significativement tandis que le rendement reste élevé, particulièrement dans le modele d'observation intention. En plus de ces composantes du modèle, les POMDPs exigent également une fonction de récompense. Donc, nous proposons de nouveaux algorithmes pour l'apprentissage du modele de récompenses, un apprentissage qui est basé sur le renforcement inverse (IRL). En particulier, nous proposons POMDP-IRL-BT qui fonctionne sur les états de croyance disponibles dans les dialogues du corpus. L'algorithme apprend le modele de récompense par l'estimation du modele de transition de croyance, semblable aux modèles de transition des états dans un MDP (processus décisionnel de Markov). Finalement, nous appliquons les méthodes proposées à un domaine de la santé en vue d'apprendre un POMDP-dialogue et ce essentiellement à partir de dialogues réels, bruités, et sans annotations.Spoken dialogue systems should realize the user intentions and maintain a natural and efficient dialogue with users. This is however a difficult task as spoken language is naturally ambiguous and uncertain, and further the automatic speech recognition (ASR) output is noisy. In addition, the human user may change his intention during the interaction with the machine. To tackle this difficult task, the partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP) framework has been applied in dialogue systems as a formal framework to represent uncertainty explicitly while supporting automated policy solving. In this context, estimating the dialogue POMDP model components is a signifficant challenge as they have a direct impact on the optimized dialogue POMDP policy. This thesis proposes methods for learning dialogue POMDP model components using noisy and unannotated dialogues. Speciffically, we introduce techniques to learn the set of possible user intentions from dialogues, use them as the dialogue POMDP states, and learn a maximum likelihood POMDP transition model from data. Since it is crucial to reduce the observation state size, we then propose two observation models: the keyword model and the intention model. Using these two models, the number of observations is reduced signifficantly while the POMDP performance remains high particularly in the intention POMDP. In addition to these model components, POMDPs also require a reward function. So, we propose new algorithms for learning the POMDP reward model from dialogues based on inverse reinforcement learning (IRL). In particular, we propose the POMDP-IRL-BT algorithm (BT for belief transition) that works on the belief states available in the dialogues. This algorithm learns the reward model by estimating a belief transition model, similar to MDP (Markov decision process) transition models. Ultimately, we apply the proposed methods on a healthcare domain and learn a dialogue POMDP essentially from real unannotated and noisy dialogues

Learning About Meetings

Most people participate in meetings almost every day, multiple times a day. The study of meetings is important, but also challenging, as it requires an understanding of social signals and complex interpersonal dynamics. Our aim this work is to use a data-driven approach to the science of meetings. We provide tentative evidence that: i) it is possible to automatically detect when during the meeting a key decision is taking place, from analyzing only the local dialogue acts, ii) there are common patterns in the way social dialogue acts are interspersed throughout a meeting, iii) at the time key decisions are made, the amount of time left in the meeting can be predicted from the amount of time that has passed, iv) it is often possible to predict whether a proposal during a meeting will be accepted or rejected based entirely on the language (the set of persuasive words) used by the speaker