Dialogue management using reinforcement learning

Dialogue has been widely used for verbal communication between human and robot interaction, such as assistant robot in hospital. However, this robot was usually limited by predetermined dialogue, so it will be difficult to understand new words for new desired goal. In this paper, we discussed conversation in Indonesian on entertainment, motivation, emergency, and helping with knowledge growing method. We provided mp3 audio for music, fairy tale, comedy request, and motivation. The execution time for this request was 3.74 ms on average. In emergency situation, patient able to ask robot to call the nurse. Robot will record complaint of pain and inform nurse. From 7 emergency reports, all complaints were successfully saved on database. In helping conversation, robot will walk to pick up belongings of patient. Once the robot did not understand with patient’s conversation, robot will ask until it understands. From asking conversation, knowledge expands from 2 to 10, with learning execution from 1405 ms to 3490 ms. SARSA was faster towards steady state because of higher cumulative rewards. Q-learning and SARSA were achieved desired object within 200 episodes. It concludes that reinforcement learning (RL) method to overcome robot knowledge limitation in achieving new dialogue goal for patient assistant were achieved.