Abstract
In this paper, we present a persona aware neural reinforcement learning response generation framework capable of optimizing long-term rewards carefully devised by system developers. The proposed model utilizes an extension of the recently introduced Hierarchical Encoder Decoder (HRED) architecture. We leverage insights from Reinforcement Learning (RL) and employ policy gradient methods to optimize rewards which are defined as simple heuristic approximations that indicate good conversation to a human mind. The proposed model is demonstrated on two benchmark datasets. Empirical results indicate that the proposed approach outperforms their counterparts that do not optimize long-term rewards, have no access to personas, standard models trained using solely maximum-likelihood estimation objective.
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Acknowledgement
Dr. Sriparna Saha gratefully acknowledges the Young Faculty Research Fellowship (YFRF) Award, supported by Visvesvaraya Ph.D. Scheme for Electronics and IT, Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), Government of India, being implemented by Digital India Corporation (formerly Media Lab Asia) for carrying out this research.
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Saha, T., Chopra, S., Saha, S., Bhattacharyya, P. (2020). Reinforcement Learning Based Personalized Neural Dialogue Generation. In: Yang, H., Pasupa, K., Leung, A.CS., Kwok, J.T., Chan, J.H., King, I. (eds) Neural Information Processing. ICONIP 2020. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1332. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-63820-7_81
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