USER MODEL ACQUISITION HEURISTICS BASED ON DIALOGUE ACTS

Abstract

A wide-spread technique for user model acquisition is the use of acquisition heuristics, which are normally employed for inferring assumptions about the user's beliefs or goals from observed user actions. These beliefs or goals can often be characterized as presuppositions to communicative actions that the user performs. In the area of natural-language systems, presupposition analysis techniques have been applied for making assumptions about the dialogue partner based on the types of speech acts that he or she employs. In this paper, we will generalize this approach and investigate the analysis of so-called `dialogue acts', i.e. communicative actions on the user interface whose execution entails user beliefs or goals as presuppositions of the action. Dialogue act types with schematic presuppositions will be proposed as a means for formulating and generalizing user model acquisition heuristics. Several dialogue act types, both general ones applicable to any interactive system and specia...