Second European Working Session on LearningBled, Yugoslavia, May 13-15, 1987

The shift towards mixed initiative interaction raises the problem of maintaining an ongoing dialogue. When all the initiative rests with the system this problem does not arise, there is only one way traffic from system to user. But when mixed initiative is allowed or even is desired, many problems arise in the domains of language understanding, language generation, and dialogue maintenance. These issues were discussed in several papers on questionanswering systems and Help systems. How to maintain an ongoing dialogue, how to keep track of topics, and how to handle topic shifts are getting into focus more and more. Although limited results have been obtained in this area, much work remains to be done.