User-Aware Dialogue Management Policies over Attributed Bi-Automata

Designing dialogue policies that take user behavior into account is complicated due to user vari- ability and behavioral uncertainty. Attributed Prob- abilistic Finite State Bi-Automata (A-PFSBA) have proven to be a promising framework to develop dia- logue managers that capture the users’ actions in its structure and adapt to them online, yet developing poli- cies robust to high user uncertainty is still challenging. In this paper, the theoretical A-PFSBA dialogue man- agement framework is augmented by formally defining the notation of exploitation policies over its structure. Under such definition, multiple path based policies are implemented, those that take into account external in- formation and those which do not. These policies are evaluated on the Let’s Go corpus, before and after an online learning process whose goal is to update the ini- tial model through the interaction with end-users. In these experiments the impact of user uncertainty and the model structural learning is thoroughly analyzedSpanish Minister of Science under grants TIN2014-54288-C4- 4-R and TIN2017-85854-C4-3-R European Commission H2020 SC1-PM15 EMPATHIC project, RIA grant 69872

Reinforcement Learning

Brains rule the world, and brain-like computation is increasingly used in computers and electronic devices. Brain-like computation is about processing and interpreting data or directly putting forward and performing actions. Learning is a very important aspect. This book is on reinforcement learning which involves performing actions to achieve a goal. The first 11 chapters of this book describe and extend the scope of reinforcement learning. The remaining 11 chapters show that there is already wide usage in numerous fields. Reinforcement learning can tackle control tasks that are too complex for traditional, hand-designed, non-learning controllers. As learning computers can deal with technical complexities, the tasks of human operators remain to specify goals on increasingly higher levels. This book shows that reinforcement learning is a very dynamic area in terms of theory and applications and it shall stimulate and encourage new research in this field

A Bi-Encoder LSTM Model for Learning Unstructured Dialogs

Creating a data-driven model that is trained on a large dataset of unstructured dialogs is a crucial step in developing a Retrieval-based Chatbot systems. This thesis presents a Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) based Recurrent Neural Network architecture that learns unstructured multi-turn dialogs and provides implementation results on the task of selecting the best response from a collection of given responses. Ubuntu Dialog Corpus Version 2 (UDCv2) was used as the corpus for training. Ryan et al. (2015) explored learning models such as TF-IDF (Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency), Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) and a Dual Encoder (DE) based on Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) model suitable to learn from the Ubuntu Dialog Corpus Version 1 (UDCv1). We use this same architecture but on UDCv2 as a benchmark and introduce a new LSTM based architecture called the Bi-Encoder LSTM model (BE) that achieves 0.8%, 1.0% and 0.3% higher accuracy for Recall@1, Recall@2 and Recall@5 respectively than the DE model. In contrast to the DE model, the proposed BE model has separate encodings for utterances and responses. The BE model also has a different similarity measure for utterance and response matching than that of the benchmark model. We further explore the BE model by performing various experiments. We also show results on experiments performed by using several similarity functions, model hyper-parameters and word embeddings on the proposed architecture

Framework for Human Computer Interaction for Learning Dialogue Strategies using Controlled Natural Language in Information Systems

Spoken Language systems are going to have a tremendous impact in all the real world applications, be it healthcare enquiry, public transportation system or airline booking system maintaining the language ethnicity for interaction among users across the globe. These system have the capability of interacting with the user in di erent languages that the system supports. Normally when a person interacts with another person there are many non-verbal clues which guide the dialogue and all the utterances have a contextual relationship, which manage the dialogue as its mixed by the two speakers. Human Computer Interaction has a wide impact on the design of the applications and has become one of the emerging interest area of the researchers. All of us are witness to an explosive electronic revolution where lots of gadgets and gizmo's have surrounded us, advanced not only in power, design, applications but the ease of access or what we call user friendly interfaces are designed that we can easily use and control all the functionality of the devices. Since speech is one of the most intuitive form of interaction that humans use. It provides potential bene ts such as handfree access to machines, ergonomics and greater e ciency of interaction. Yet, speech-based interfaces design has been an expert job for a long time. Lot of research has been done in building real spoken Dialogue Systems which can interact with humans using voice interactions and help in performing various tasks as are done by humans. Last two decades have seen utmost advanced research in the automatic speech recognition, dialogue management, text to speech synthesis and Natural Language Processing for various applications which have shown positive results. This dissertation proposes to apply machine learning (ML) techniques to the problem of optimizing the dialogue management strategy selection in the Spoken Dialogue system prototype design. Although automatic speech recognition and system initiated dialogues where the system expects an answer in the form of `yes' or `no' have already been applied to Spoken Dialogue Systems( SDS), no real attempt to use those techniques in order to design a new system from scratch has been made. In this dissertation, we propose some novel ideas in order to achieve the goal of easing the design of Spoken Dialogue Systems and allow novices to have access to voice technologies. A framework for simulating and evaluating dialogues and learning optimal dialogue strategies in a controlled Natural Language is proposed. The simulation process is based on a probabilistic description of a dialogue and on the stochastic modelling of both arti cial NLP modules composing a SDS and the user. This probabilistic model is based on a set of parameters that can be tuned from the prior knowledge from the discourse or learned from data. The evaluation is part of the simulation process and is based on objective measures provided by each module. Finally, the simulation environment is connected to a learning agent using the supplied evaluation metrics as an objective function in order to generate an optimal behaviour for the SDS