Issue-based Dialogue Management

Abstract

The purpose of studying dialogue modelling and dialogue management is to provide models allowing us to explore how language, and especially spoken dialogue, is used in different activities. This thesis shows how issues (modelled semantically as questions) in general can be used as a basis for dialogue management. In an abstract sense, the goal of all practical dialogue is to communicate information which is useful in some activity. This means that conversational goals should describe missing information, and to fulfil a conversational goal, what we need to do is to communicate the missing information. Issues, or questions, are essentially entities specifying certain pieces of as-yet-unavailable information. That is, conversational goals can to a large extent be modelled as questions. The exploration of issue-based dialogue management in this thesis proceeds both on a theoretical and a practical implementation level. The thesis first explores basic issuebased dialogue management and implement a basic system illustrating the use of issuebased dialogue management. In the following chapters, this simple system is extended to