VIE-DPM: A User Model in a Natural-Language Dialog System

User modelling is becoming recognized as a key issue in the design of cooperative dialogue systems. Assumptions about the beliefs, goals and plans of the user are seen as necessary prerequisites for a system to be capable of exhibiting user-oriented dialogue behaviour. This paper gives a survey of VIE-DPM, the user model in the natural language dialogue system VIE-LANG. In VIE-DPM, specific kinds of inferences about the user’s beliefs and wants are generated from his natural-1anguage input to the system, as well as from the system’s replies to the user. These assumptions are stored in a comprehensive representation system and can be used for supporting other components of VIE-LANG.