Inproceedings,
Conversational Agency: The Trains-93 Dialogue Manager
In Susann LuperFoy, Anton Nijhholt, and Gert Veldhuijzen van Zanten, editors, Proceedings of Twente Workshop on Language Technology, TWLT-II, page 1--11. (1996)
Abstract
Designing an agent to participate in natural conversation requires more than just adapting a standard agent model to perceive and produce language. In particular, the model must be augmented with social attitudes (including mutual belief, shared plans, and obligations) and a notion of discourse context. The dialogue manager of the TRAINS-93 NL conversation system embodies such an augmented theory of agency. This paper focuses on the representation of mental state and discourse context and the deliberation strategies used in the agent model of the dialogue manager. 1 INTRODUCTION A dialogue manager is that part of a dialogue system that connects the I/O devices and translators (whether they be spoken or typed language, a command language, menu selection, graphical presentation, etc.) to the parts that do the domain task reasoning and performance. In a simple language front-end system (e.g., for querying a database), dialogue management can be little more than a transducer from the I/O ...
