Plan-based dialogue management in a physics tutor

Abstract

This paper describes an application of APE (the Atlas Planning Engine), an integrated planning and execution system at the heart of the Atlas dialogue management system. APE controls a mixed-initiative dialogue between a human user and a host system, where turns in the 'conversation' may include graphical actions and/or written text. APE has full unification and can handle arbitrarily nested discourse constructs, making it more powerful than dialogue managers based on finitestate machines. We illustrate this work by describing Atlas-Andes, an intelligent tutoring system built using APE with the Andes physics tutor as the host.