Using a Reactive Planner as the Basis for a Dialogue Agent

Abstract

This paper describes APE (the Atlas Planning Engine), the reactive planner at the center of the Atlas dialogue management system. The goal of Atlas is to build conversation-based systems, where turns in the "conversation " may include graphical actions and/or text. Since APE can be used to generate a dialogue involving arbitrarily nested discourse constructs, it is more powerful than dialogue planners based on finite-state machines. Although it is intended largely to model dialogue containing hierarchical, multi-turn plans, APE can also be used as a general-purpose programming tool for implementing a dialogue system. Introduction Dialogues such as the one in Figure 1 play an important role in text-based applications involving communication between a person and a computer, such as intelligent tutoring systems (ITSs), advice-giving systems and interactive help systems. In the past, such systems have often been implemented with finite-state machines, either simple or augmente...