A Dialogue Manager Using Initiative-Response Units and Distributed Control

This paper describes a system for managing dialogue in a natural language interface. The proposed approach uses a dialogue manager as the overall control mechanism. The dialogue manager accesses domain independent resources for interpretation, generation and background system access. It also uses information from domain dependent knowledge sources, which are customized for various applications.Instead of using complex plan-based reasoning, the dialogue manager uses information about possible interaction structures and information from the specific dialogue situation to manage the dialogue. This is motivated from the analysis of a series of experiments where users interacted with a simulated natural language interface. The dialogue manager integrates information about segment types and moves into a hierarchical dialogue tree. The dialogue tree is accessed through a scoreboard which uses exchangeable access functions. The control is distributed and the dialogue is directed from action plans in the nodes in the dialogue tree.