A novel factored POMDP model for affective dialogue management

Abstract

Partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP) model has been demonstrated many times to be suited for robust spoken dialogue management. Recently, some factored representations of POMDP model are designed for specific dialogue tasks. This paper proposes a novel factored POMDP model to describe a new application of affective dialogue management. Different from existing models, the user's state space and the system's observation space are both divided into two distinct components: goal and emotion. Moreover, the system's action space is for the first time factored into two parts, i.e., goal response and emotion response, and the reward function is accordingly updated by weighted sum of the two-part rewards. An example of intelligent music player is given to explain how to apply the new model to build an affective dialogue system. Four experiments are designed to reveal the influence of key parameters on the system performance. The simulation results demonstrate the rationality and feasibility of the proposed model.