Hybrid Policy Dialogue Manager for Intelligent Personal Assistants

A method for providing responsive actions to user inputs in a multi-domain context includes receiving, by a speech-based user interface, a first speech input from a user and converting said first speech input into a text-based representation of the first speech input. A natural language processor processes the text-based representation to determine an intent, entity and internal state of the first speech input. The method further includes determining, by a model-based module based on the intent, entity and internal state, a first data processing policy to apply to the first speech input, wherein the first data processing policy is either a rules-based data processing policy applied by a rules-based module or a statistical model-based data processing policy applied by the model-based module. The first responsive action is generated by the determined first data processing module, and outputted via the speech-based user interface and/or a machine interface.