In this work, we develop an end-to-end Reinforcement Learning based architecture for a conversational search agent to assist users in searching on an e-commerce marketplace for digital assets. Our approach caters to a search task fundamentally different from the ones which have limited search modalities where the user can express his preferences objectively. The system interacts with the users to display search results to the queries, and gauges user's intent and context of the conversation to choose the next action and reply. To train the agent in the absence of true conversation data, a virtual user is constructed to model a human user using the query and session logs from a major stock photography and digital assets marketplace. The system provides an alternative that is more engaging than the traditional search while maintaining similar effectiveness. This work provides a mechanism to build and deploy bootstrapped version of an effective conversational agent from readily available query log data. The system can then be used to acquire true conversational data and be fine-tuned further. The methodology discussed in this paper can be extended to e-commerce domains in general.
A long-term goal of machine learning is to build intelligent conversational agents. One recent popular approach is to train end-to-end models on a large amount of real dialog transcripts between humans (, 2015; Vinyals & Le, 2015; , 2015). However, this approach leaves many questions unanswered as an understanding of the precise successes and shortcomings of each model is hard to assess. A contrasting recent proposal are the bAbI tasks (, 2015b) which are synthetic data that measure the ability of learning machines at various reasoning tasks over toy language. Unfortunately, those tests are very small and hence may encourage methods that do not scale. In this work, we propose a suite of new tasks of a much larger scale that attempt to bridge the gap between the two regimes. Choosing the domain of movies, we provide tasks that test the ability of models to answer factual questions (utilizing OMDB), provide personalization (utilizing MovieLens), carry short conversations about the two, and finally to perform on natural dialogs from Reddit. We provide a dataset covering 75k movie entities and with 3.5M training examples. We present results of various models on these tasks, and evaluate their performance.