@inproceedings{williams-etal-2017-hybrid,
    title = "Hybrid Code Networks: practical and efficient end-to-end dialog control with supervised and reinforcement learning",
    author = "Williams, Jason D.  and
      Asadi, Kavosh  and
      Zweig, Geoffrey",
    editor = "Barzilay, Regina  and
      Kan, Min-Yen",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
    month = jul,
    year = "2017",
    address = "Vancouver, Canada",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/P17-1062/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/P17-1062",
    pages = "665--677",
    abstract = "End-to-end learning of recurrent neural networks (RNNs) is an attractive solution for dialog systems; however, current techniques are data-intensive and require thousands of dialogs to learn simple behaviors. We introduce Hybrid Code Networks (HCNs), which combine an RNN with domain-specific knowledge encoded as software and system action templates. Compared to existing end-to-end approaches, HCNs considerably reduce the amount of training data required, while retaining the key benefit of inferring a latent representation of dialog state. In addition, HCNs can be optimized with supervised learning, reinforcement learning, or a mixture of both. HCNs attain state-of-the-art performance on the bAbI dialog dataset (Bordes and Weston, 2016), and outperform two commercially deployed customer-facing dialog systems at our company."
}