Learning to Adapt to Unknown Users: Referring Expression Generation in Spoken Dialogue Systems

We present a data-driven approach to learn user-adaptive referring expression generation (REG) policies for spoken dialogue systems. Referring expressions can be difficult to understand in technical domains where users may not know the technical `jargon' names of the domain entities. In such cases, dialogue systems must be able to model the user's (lexical) domain knowledge and use appropriate referring expressions. We present a reinforcement learning (RL) framework in which the system learns REG policies which can adapt to unknown users online. Furthermore, unlike supervised learning methods which require a large corpus of expert adaptive behaviour to train on, we show that effective adaptive policies can be learned from a small dialogue corpus of non-adaptive human-machine interaction, by using a RL framework and a statistical user simulation. We show that in comparison to adaptive hand-coded baseline policies, the learned policy performs significantly better, with an 18.6...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: ACL
• Authors: Srinivasan Janarthanam, Oliver Lemon
• Keywords: ACL 2010, Appropriate Referring Expressions, Computational Linguistics, Dialogue Systems, Policies