Dialogue Moves and Information States

We present an experiment in annotating a dialogue using a stripped down variant of Ginzburg's (1996a, 1996b, 1998) view of the dialogue game board, including questions under discussion (QUD). The aim is to try to develop a method of annotation that might be useful to a dialogue system developer in specifying a system that could deal with a certain type of dialogue. In this rst experiment we annotated a task oriented dialogue with as simple a notion of information state as we could imagine would be able to illuminate the dynamics of QUD management. We found that a number of interesting issues were raised by the annotation and that there were interesting possibilities for deening dialogue moves in terms of transitions between these information states.