Policy Optimization for Spoken Dialog Management Using Genetic Algorithm

Abstract

The optimization of spoken dialog management policies is a non-trivial task due to the erroneous inputs from speech recognition and language understanding modules. The dialog manager needs to ground uncertain semantic information at times to fully understand the need of human users and successfully complete the required dialog tasks. Approaches based on reinforcement learning are currently mainstream in academia and have been proved to be effective, especially when operating in noisy environments. However, in reinforcement learning the dialog strategy is often represented by complex numeric model and thus is incomprehensible to humans. The trained policies are very difficult for dialog system designers to verify or modify, which largely limits the deployment for commercial applications. In this paper we propose a novel framework for optimizing dialog policies specified in human-readable domain language using genetic algorithm. We present learning algorithms using user simulator and real human-machine dialog corpora. Empirical experimental results show that the proposed approach can achieve competitive performance on par with some state-of-the-art reinforcement learning algorithms, while maintaining a comprehensible policy structure.