An End-to-End Trainable Neural Network Model with Belief Tracking for Task-Oriented Dialog

We present a novel end-to-end trainable neural network model for task-oriented dialog systems. The model is able to track dialog state, issue API calls to knowledge base (KB), and incorporate structured KB query results into system responses to successfully complete task-oriented dialogs. The proposed model produces well-structured system responses by jointly learning belief tracking and KB result processing conditioning on the dialog history. We evaluate the model in a restaurant search domain using a dataset that is converted from the second Dialog State Tracking Challenge (DSTC2) corpus. Experiment results show that the proposed model can robustly track dialog state given the dialog history. Moreover, our model demonstrates promising results in producing appropriate system responses, outperforming prior end-to-end trainable neural network models using per-response accuracy evaluation metrics.Comment: Published at Interspeech 201

A POMDP approach to Affective Dialogue Modeling

We propose a novel approach to developing a dialogue model that is able to take into account some aspects of the user's affective state and to act appropriately. Our dialogue model uses a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process approach with observations composed of the observed user's affective state and action. A simple example of route navigation is explained to clarify our approach. The preliminary results showed that: (1) the expected return of the optimal dialogue strategy depends on the correlation between the user's affective state & the user's action and (2) the POMDP dialogue strategy outperforms five other dialogue strategies (the random, three handcrafted and greedy action selection strategies)