A general planning-based framework for goal-driven conversation assistant

Abstract

We propose a general framework for goal-driven conversation assistant based on Planning methods. It aims to rapidly build a dialogue agent with less handcrafting and make the more interpretable and efficient dialogue management in various scenarios. By employing the Planning method, dialogue actions can be efficiently defined and reusable, and the transition of the dialogue are managed by a Planner. The proposed framework consists of a pipeline of Natural Language Understanding (intent labeler), Planning of Actions (with a World Model), and Natural Language Generation (learned by an attention-based neural network). We demonstrate our approach by creating conversational agents for several independent domains.