Hybrid Code Networks: practical and efficient end-to-end dialog control with supervised and reinforcement learning
J. D. Williams, Kavosh Asadi, Geoffrey Zweig · 2017
End-to-end learning of recurrent neural networks (RNNs) is an attractive solution for dialog systems; however, current techniques are data-intensive and require thousands of dialogs to learn simple behaviors.We introduce Hybrid Code Networks (HCNs), which combine an RNN with domain-specific knowledge encoded as software and system action templates.Compared to existing end-toend approaches, HCNs considerably reduce the amount of training data required, while retaining the key benefit of inferring a latent representation of dialog state.In addition, HCNs can be optimized with supervised learning, reinforcement learning, or a mixture of both.HCNs attain stateof-the-art performance on the bAbI dialog dataset (Bordes and Weston, 2016), and outperform two commercially deployed customer-facing dialog systems.