A Survey on Recent Advances and Challenges in Reinforcement Learning Methods for Task-Oriented Dialogue Policy Learning
It provides a comprehensive review for researchers in dialogue systems, but is incremental as it synthesizes existing work.
This paper surveys recent advances and challenges in using reinforcement learning for task-oriented dialogue policy learning, summarizing major problems and solutions without presenting new experimental results.
Dialogue Policy Learning is a key component in a task-oriented dialogue system (TDS) that decides the next action of the system given the dialogue state at each turn. Reinforcement Learning (RL) is commonly chosen to learn the dialogue policy, regarding the user as the environment and the system as the agent. Many benchmark datasets and algorithms have been created to facilitate the development and evaluation of dialogue policy based on RL. In this paper, we survey recent advances and challenges in dialogue policy from the prescriptive of RL. More specifically, we identify the major problems and summarize corresponding solutions for RL-based dialogue policy learning. Besides, we provide a comprehensive survey of applying RL to dialogue policy learning by categorizing recent methods into basic elements in RL. We believe this survey can shed a light on future research in dialogue management.