Modern machine learning techniques in the natural language processing domain can be used to automatically generate scripts for goal-oriented dialogue systems. The current article presents a general framework for studying the automatic generation of scripts for goal-oriented dialogue systems. A method for preprocessing dialog data sets in JSON format is described. A comparison is made of two methods for extracting user intent based on BERTopic and latent Dirichlet allocation. A comparison has been made of two implemented algorithms for classifying statements of users of a goal-oriented dialogue system based on logistic regression and BERT transformer models. The BERT transformer approach using the bert-base-uncased model showed better results for the three metrics Precision (0.80), F1-score (0.78) and Matthews correlation coefficient (0.74) in comparison with other methods.

Learning goal-oriented dialogues by means of deep reinforcement learning has recently become a popular research topic. However, training text-generating agents efficiently is still a considerable challenge. Commonly used policy-based dialogue agents often end up focusing on simple utterances and suboptimal policies. To mitigate this problem, we propose a class of novel temperature-based extensions for policy gradient methods, which are referred to as Tempered Policy Gradients (TPGs). These methods encourage exploration with different temperature control strategies. We derive three variations of the TPGs and show their superior performance on a recently published AI-testbed, i.e., the GuessWhat?! game. On the testbed, we achieve significant improvements with two innovations. The first one is an extension of the state-of-the-art solutions with Seq2Seq and Memory Network structures that leads to an improvement of 9%. The second one is the application of our newly developed TPG methods, which improves the performance additionally by around 5% and, even more importantly, helps produce more convincing utterances. TPG can easily be applied to any goal-oriented dialogue systems.