Dialogue assistants are rapidly becoming an indispensable daily aid. To avoid the significant effort needed to hand-craft the required dialogue flow, the Dialogue Management (DM) module can be cast as a continuous Markov Decision Process (MDP) and trained through Reinforcement Learning (RL). Several RL models have been investigated over recent years. However, the lack of a common benchmarking framework makes it difficult to perform a fair comparison between different models and their capability to generalise to different environments. Therefore, this paper proposes a set of challenging simulated environments for dialogue model development and evaluation. To provide some baselines, we investigate a number of representative parametric algorithms, namely deep reinforcement learning algorithms - DQN, A2C and Natural Actor-Critic and compare them to a non-parametric model, GP-SARSA. Both the environments and policy models are implemented using the publicly available PyDial toolkit and released on-line, in order to establish a testbed framework for further experiments and to facilitate experimental reproducibility.

本文旨在提供用于对话模型开发与评估的一组具有挑战性的模拟环境，其中包括常用的参数算法和非参数算法，并使用公共PyDial工具包实现了这些环境和策略模型，以建立一个实验测试平台并促进可重现性的实验。

强化学习任务导向对话管理基准测试环境