SimpleDS: A Simple Deep Reinforcement Learning Dialogue System

This article presents SimpleDS, a simple and publicly available dialogue system trained with deep reinforcement learning. In contrast to previous reinforcement learning dialogue systems, this system avoids manual feature engineering by performing action selection directly from raw text of the last system and (noisy) user responses. Our initial results, in the restaurant domain, report that it is indeed possible to induce reasonable behaviours with such an approach that aims for higher levels of automation in dialogue control for intelligent interactive systems and robots.