Online Adaptation of an Attention-Based Neural Network for Natural Language Generation

Following some recent propositions to handle natural language generation in spoken dialog systems with long short-term memory recurrent neural network models [1] we first investigate a variant thereof with the objective of a better integration of the attention subnetwork. Then our main objective is to propose and evaluate a framework to adapt the NLG module online through direct interactions with the users. When doing so the basic way is to ask the user to utter an alternative sentence to express a particular dialog act. But then the system has to decide between using an automatic transcription or to ask for a manual transcription. To do so a reinforcement learning approach based on an adversarial bandit scheme is retained. We show that by defining appropriately the rewards as a linear combination of expected payoffs and costs of acquiring the new data provided by the user, a system design can balance between improving the system’s performance towards a better match with the user’s preferences and the burden associated with it.