Bayesian Inverse Reinforcement Learning for Modeling Conversational Agents in a Virtual Environment

• Published in: Computational Linguistics and Intelligent Text Processing pp. 503 - 514
• Main Authors: Rojas-Barahona, Lina M., Cerisara, Christophe
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Berlin, Heidelberg Springer Berlin Heidelberg 2014
• Series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science
• Subjects: Dialogue System; Markov Decision Process; Policy Iteration; Reward Function; Virtual Character
• ISBN: 9783642549052; 3642549055
• ISSN: 0302-9743; 1611-3349
• DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-54906-9_41

This work proposes a Bayesian approach to learn the behavior of human characters that give advice and help users to complete tasks in a situated environment. We apply Bayesian Inverse Reinforcement Learning (BIRL) to infer this behavior in the context of a serious game, given evidence in the form of stored dialogues provided by experts who play the role of several conversational agents in the game. We show that the proposed approach converges relatively quickly and that it outperforms two baseline systems, including a dialogue manager trained to provide “locally” optimal decisions.