Plan revision in person-machine dialogue

Abstract

Dialogue is a cooperative process in which each speech act of the participants contributes to the overall purpose of the dialogue. Participating in a full dialogue implies understanding at each point of the dialogue session the role of each speech act with respect to the rest of the dialogue. We concentrate in this paper on speech acts that diverge from the straight-forward unfolding of the dialogue. Such speech acts represent dialogue deviations. We analyze the representation of different types and degrees of deviations and present a plan revision mechanism for dialogue management that permits their treatment in the context of advice giving dialogues between a novice user and an expert problem solver.