Task-oriented dialog systems utilizing combined supervised and reinforcement learning

Abstract

Techniques for intelligent task-oriented multi-turn dialog system automation are described. A seq2seq ML model can be trained using a corpus of training data and a loss function that is based at least in part on a distance to a goal. The seq2seq ML model can be provided a user utterance as an input, and a vector of a plurality of values output by a plurality of hidden units of a decoder of the seq2seq ML model can be used to select one or more candidate responses to the user utterance via a nearest neighbor algorithm. In some embodiments, the specially adapted seq2seq ML model can be trained using unsupervised learning, and can be adapted to select intelligent, coherent agent responses that move a task-oriented dialog toward its completion.