Proceedings of the 17th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue

Abstract

We extend special thanks to our Local co-Chairs, Ron Artstein and Alesia Gainer, and their team of student volunteers. We know SIGDIAL 2016 would not have been possible without Ron and Alesia, who invested so much effort in arranging the conference venue and accommodations, handling registration, making banquet arrangements, and handling numerous other preparations for the conference. The student volunteers for on-site assistance also deserve our appreciation.Ethan Selfridge, Sponsorships Chair, has earned our appreciation for recruiting and liaising with our conference sponsors, many of whom continue to contribute year after year. Sponsorships support valuable aspects of the program, such as the invited speakers and conference banquet. In recognition of this, we gratefully acknowledge the support of our sponsors: (Platinum level) Microsoft Research, Xerox and PARC, Intel, (Gold level) Facebook, (Silver level) Amazon Alexa, Interactions, Educational Testing Service, Honda Research Institute, and Yahoo!. At the same time, we thank Priscilla Rasmussen at the ACL for tirelessly handling the financial aspects of sponsorship for SIGDIAL 2016, and for securing our ISBN.iii We also thank the SIGdial board, especially officers Amanda Stent, Jason Williams and Kristiina Jokinen for their advice and support from beginning to end.Finally, we thank all the authors of the papers in this volume, and all the conference participants for making this stimulating event a valuable opportunity for growth in the research areas of discourse and dialogue. AbstractThis paper presents an end-to-end framework for task-oriented dialog systems using a variant of Deep Recurrent QNetworks (DRQN). The model is able to interface with a relational database and jointly learn policies for both language understanding and dialog strategy. Moreover, we propose a hybrid algorithm that combines the strength of reinforcement learning and supervised learning to achieve faster learning speed. We evaluated the proposed model on a 20 Question Game conversational game simulator. Results show that the proposed method outperforms the modular-based baseline and learns a distributed representation of the latent dialog state. IntroductionTask-oriented dialog systems have been an important branch of spoken dialog system (SDS) research (Raux et al., 2005; Young, 2006; Bohus and Rudnicky, 2003). The SDS agent has to achieve some predefined targets (e.g. booking a flight) through natural language interaction with the users. The typical structure of a task-oriented dialog system is outlined in Figure 1 (Young, 2006). This pipeline consists of several independently-developed modules: natural language understanding (the NLU) maps the user utterances to some semantic representation. This information is further processed by the dialog state tracker (DST), which accumulates the input of the turn along with the dialog history. The DST outputs the current dialog state and the dialog policy selects the next system action based on the dialog state. Then natural language gene...