A major bottleneck for building statistical spoken dialogue systems for new domains and applications is the need for large amounts of training data. To address this problem, we adopt the multi-dimensional approach to dialogue management and evaluate its potential for transfer learning. Specifically, we exploit pre-trained task-independent policies to speed up training for an extended task-specific action set, in which the single summary action for requesting a slot is replaced by multiple slot-specific request actions. Policy optimisation and evaluation experiments using an agenda-based user simulator show that with limited training data, much better performance levels can be achieved when using the proposed multi-dimensional adaptation method. We confirm this improvement in a crowd-sourced human user evaluation of our spoken dialogue system, comparing partially trained policies. The multi-dimensional system (with adaptation on limited training data in the target scenario) outperforms the one-dimensional baseline (without adaptation on the same amount of training data) by 7% perceived success rate.
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