SIGdial 2015

16th Annual SIGdial Meeting on Discourse and Dialogue

Human-Machine Dialogue as a Stochastic Game

Merwan Barlier, Julien Perolat, Romain Laroche and Olivier Pietquin
In this paper, an original framework to model human-machine spoken dialogues is proposed to deal with co-adaptation between users and Spoken Dialogue Systems in non-cooperative tasks. The conversation is modeled as a Stochastic Game: both the user and the system have their own preferences but have to come up with an agreement to solve a non-cooperative task. They are jointly trained so the Dialogue Manager learns the optimal strategy against the best possible user. Results obtained by simulation show that non-trivial strategies are learned and that this framework is suitable for dialogue modeling.