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Converse-Et-Impera: Exploiting Deep Learning and Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning for Conversational Recommender Systems

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Abstract

In this paper, we propose a framework based on Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning for dialogue management in a Conversational Recommender System scenario. The framework splits the dialogue into more manageable tasks whose achievement corresponds to goals of the dialogue with the user. The framework consists of a meta-controller, which receives the user utterance and understands which goal should pursue, and a controller, which exploits a goal-specific representation to generate an answer composed by a sequence of tokens. The modules are trained using a two-stage strategy based on a preliminary Supervised Learning stage and a successive Reinforcement Learning stage.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://www.tensorflow.org/api_docs/python/tf/contrib/seq2seq.

  2. 2.

    NLTK word tokenizer documentation: https://goo.gl/L4Y1Rc.

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Correspondence to Pierpaolo Basile .

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Greco, C., Suglia, A., Basile, P., Semeraro, G. (2017). Converse-Et-Impera: Exploiting Deep Learning and Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning for Conversational Recommender Systems. In: Esposito, F., Basili, R., Ferilli, S., Lisi, F. (eds) AI*IA 2017 Advances in Artificial Intelligence. AI*IA 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10640. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70169-1_28

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70169-1_28

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