A conversational agent facilitates conversational searches for users. The conversational agent is a reinforcement learning (RL) agent trained using a user model generated from existing session logs from a search engine. The user model is generated from the session logs by mapping entries from the session logs to user actions understandable by the RL agent and computing conditional probabilities of user actions occurring given previous user actions in the session logs. The RL agent is trained by conducting conversations with the user model in which the RL agent selects agent actions in response to user actions sampled using the conditional probabilities from the user model.