Playing 20 Question Game with Policy-Based Reinforcement Learning

Huang Hu, Xianchao Wu, Bingfeng Luo, Chongyang Tao, Can Xu, Wei Wu, Zhan Chen


Abstract
The 20 Questions (Q20) game is a well known game which encourages deductive reasoning and creativity. In the game, the answerer first thinks of an object such as a famous person or a kind of animal. Then the questioner tries to guess the object by asking 20 questions. In a Q20 game system, the user is considered as the answerer while the system itself acts as the questioner which requires a good strategy of question selection to figure out the correct object and win the game. However, the optimal policy of question selection is hard to be derived due to the complexity and volatility of the game environment. In this paper, we propose a novel policy-based Reinforcement Learning (RL) method, which enables the questioner agent to learn the optimal policy of question selection through continuous interactions with users. To facilitate training, we also propose to use a reward network to estimate the more informative reward. Compared to previous methods, our RL method is robust to noisy answers and does not rely on the Knowledge Base of objects. Experimental results show that our RL method clearly outperforms an entropy-based engineering system and has competitive performance in a noisy-free simulation environment.
Anthology ID:
D18-1361
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
October-November
Year:
2018
Address:
Brussels, Belgium
Editors:
Ellen Riloff, David Chiang, Julia Hockenmaier, Jun’ichi Tsujii
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3233–3242
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D18-1361
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D18-1361
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Huang Hu, Xianchao Wu, Bingfeng Luo, Chongyang Tao, Can Xu, Wei Wu, and Zhan Chen. 2018. Playing 20 Question Game with Policy-Based Reinforcement Learning. In Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 3233–3242, Brussels, Belgium. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Playing 20 Question Game with Policy-Based Reinforcement Learning (Hu et al., EMNLP 2018)
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