Title: Improving Search through A3C Reinforcement Learning based Conversational Agent,
Abstract: We develop a reinforcement learning based search assistant which can assist
users through a set of actions and sequence of interactions to enable them
realize their intent. Our approach caters to subjective search where the user
is seeking digital assets such as images which is fundamentally different from
the tasks which have objective and limited search modalities. Labeled
conversational data is generally not available in such search tasks and
training the agent through human interactions can be time consuming. We propose
a stochastic virtual user which impersonates a real user and can be used to
sample user behavior efficiently to train the agent which accelerates the
bootstrapping of the agent. We develop A3C algorithm based context preserving
architecture which enables the agent to provide contextual assistance to the
user. We compare the A3C agent with Q-learning and evaluate its performance on
average rewards and state values it obtains with the virtual user in validation
episodes. Our experiments show that the agent learns to achieve higher rewards
and better states.