A Model for Dialogue Management for Human Computer Interaction

This paper presents a computational model for dialogue management for user-friendly cooperative natural language interaction. The model relies on the assumption that the dialogue can be managed by a dialogue grammar based on speech act information only. Focus structure can be handled through focal parameters that model information in parameters pertaining to a set of salient domain concepts and related predicates ascribed to this set. The focus parameters are modeled in a dialogue tree. E ciency is achieved by a simple heuristic principle stating that copying relevant information from one segment to the next, updated with information from the application and user initiative, is su cient for most context dependent utterances. Which action to carry out for task related initiatives is determined from information on how these focal parameters are speci ed. The dialogue model was originally developed for written interaction, but is also applicable to spoken interaction, as presented in the paper.