Learning Latent Beliefs and Performing Epistemic Reasoning for Efficient and Meaningful Dialog Management

Abstract: Many dialogue management frameworks allow the system designer to directly define belief rules to implement an efficient dialog policy. Because these rules are directly defined, the components are said to be hand-crafted. As dialogues become more complex, the number of states, transitions, and policy decisions becomes very large. To facilitate the dialog policy design process, we propose an approach to automatically learn belief rules using a supervised machine learning approach. We validate our ideas in Student-Advisor conversation domain, where we extract latent beliefs like student is curious, confused and neutral, etc. Further, we also perform epistemic reasoning that helps to tailor the dialog according to student's emotional state and hence improve the overall effectiveness of the dialog system. Our latent belief identification approach shows an accuracy of 87% and this results in efficient and meaningful dialog management.