We explore the use of restricted dialogue contexts in reinforcement learning (RL) of effective dialogue strategies for information seeking spoken dialogue systems (. COMMUNICATOR (Walker et al., 2001)). The contexts we use are richer than previous research in this area, . (Levin and Pieraccini, 1997; Scheffler and Young, 2001; Singh et al., 2002; Pietquin, 2004), which use only slot-based information, but are much less complex than the full dialogue “Information States” explored in (Henderson et al., 2005), for which tractabe learning is an issue. .
