Events Calendar

NL Seminar - REINFORCEMENT LEARNING OF NEGOTIATION DIALOGUE POLICIES

Speaker: Kallirroi Georgila , USC/ICT

Talk Title: REINFORCEMENT LEARNING OF NEGOTIATION DIALOGUE POLICIES

Series: Natural Language Seminar

Abstract: The dialogue policy of a dialogue system decides on what dialogue move also called action, the system should make given the dialogue context also called dialogue state. Building hand crafted dialogue policies is a hard task, and there is no guarantee that the resulting policies will be optimal. This issue has motivated the dialogue community to use statistical methods for automatically learning dialogue policies, the most popular of which is reinforcement learning RL. However, to date, RL has mainly been used to learn dialogue policies in slot filling applications e.g. restaurant recommendation, flight reservation, etc. largely ignoring other more complex genres of dialogue such as negotiation. This talk presents challenges in reinforcement learning of negotiation dialogue policies. The first part of the talk focuses on applying RL to a two party multi issue negotiation domain. Here the main challenges are the very large state and action space, and learning negotiation dialogue policies that can perform well for a variety of negotiation settings, including against interlocutors whose behavior has not been observed before. Good negotiators try to adapt their behaviors based on their interlocutors' behaviors. However, current approaches to using RL for dialogue management assume that the users behavior does not change over time. In the second part of the talk, I will present an experiment that deals with this problem in a resource allocation negotiation scenario.

Biography: Kallirroi Georgila is a Research Assistant Professor at the Institute for Creative Technologies ICT at the University of Southern California US and at USCs Computer Science Department. Before joining USC ICT in 2009 she was a Research Scientist at the Educational Testing Service ETS and before that a Research Fellow at the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. Her research interests include all aspects of spoken dialogue processing with a focus on reinforcement learning of dialogue policies, expressive conversational speech synthesis, and speech recognition. She has served on the organizing, senior, and program committees of many conferences and workshops. Her research work is funded by the National Science Foundation and the Army Research Office.

Host: Marjan Ghazvininejad and Kevin Knight

More Info: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/

Location: Information Science Institute (ISI) - 11th Flr Conf Rm # 1135, Marina Del Rey

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Peter Zamar

Event Link: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/