A user simulator architecture for socially-aware conversational agents

Over the last two decades, Reinforcement Learning (RL) has emerged the method of choice for data-driven dialog management. However, one of the limitations of RL methods for the optimization of dialog managers in the context of virtual conversational agents, is that they require a large amount of data, which is often unavailable, particularly when the dialog deals with complex discourse phenomena. User simulators help address this problem by generating synthetic data to train RL agents in an online fashion. In this work, we extend user simulators to the case of socially-aware conversational agents, that combine task and social functions. We propose a novel architecture that takes into consideration the user’s conversational goals and generates both task and social behaviour. Our proposed architecture is general enough to be useful for training socially-aware conversational agents in any domain. As a proof of concept, we construct a user simulator for training a conversational recommendation agent and provide evidence towards the effectiveness of the approach.