A Cooperative Dialogue Game for Resolving Ontological Discrepancies

The goal of this paper is to present a computational framework that enables us to generate elementary speech act sequences in a dialogue between an electronic assistant and a computer user. Since naive users of complex systems often do not think and communicate in terms of domain characteristics, we will concentrate on the conversational process of the understanding of the meaning of a vocabulary shared by two dialogue participants. In order to give meaning to their vocabulary, agents need to translate terms into their private domain ontologies. We consider a dialogue game in which agents produce speech acts or ‘moves’ to transfer relevant information with respect to a particular agreement about the meaning of the words in the vocabulary. Describing the properties and the dynamics of the cognitive states or cognitive constructs in relation to the various dialogue contributions is an essential part of this work. In particular, we address the following basic questions: What type of cognitive constructs should be included to model the dialogue’s basic structural properties? How do the various dialogue contributions change the existing cognitive constructs? How do these changes influence the generation of new contributions?

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