Title: A Deep Reinforcement Learning Chatbot,
Abstract: We present MILABOT: a deep reinforcement learning chatbot developed by the
Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms (MILA) for the Amazon Alexa Prize
competition. MILABOT is capable of conversing with humans on popular small talk
topics through both speech and text. The system consists of an ensemble of
natural language generation and retrieval models, including template-based
models, bag-of-words models, sequence-to-sequence neural network and latent
variable neural network models. By applying reinforcement learning to
crowdsourced data and real-world user interactions, the system has been trained
to select an appropriate response from the models in its ensemble. The system
has been evaluated through A/B testing with real-world users, where it
performed significantly better than many competing systems. Due to its machine
learning architecture, the system is likely to improve with additional data.