The thesis specifies requirements for robust, cooperative and coherent dialogue systems and advocates a new approach, Constructive Dialogue Management. A prototype of a system capable of dealing with the planning of system reponses in factual information seeking dialogues is presented.
Constructive Dialogue Management is based on the theoretical foundation of Communicative Activity Analysis (CAA), a pragmatic theory of communication developed by Jens Allwood, and on the empirical experience gained in the PLUS project which aimed to improve robustness in dialogue systems by a pragmatics-based approach.
In CAA, communication is regarded as cooperative activity between rational agents, constrained by the requirements of ideal cooperation: the communicators have a joint purpose, they obey communicative obligations by showing cognitive and ethical consideration in their contributions and they trust the partner to behave in a rational way.
In Constructive Dialogue Management, the use of contextual knowledge is widened to include the enablements and requirements for communication. As a result, the negotiative nature of dialogues can be managed locally, and both predefined dialogue grammar and speech-act classification can be abandoned. Furthermore, by refining the goal with the help of communicative knowledge about ideal cooperation and rational activity, boundary problems between planning and realisation can be overcome.
Within this framework, solutions to two significant subproblems of response planning are presented: how to guarantee thematic coherence with respect to the preceding context, and how to combine appropriate explicitness with elliptical generation based on the communicative principles of Constructive Dialogue Management.
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