Managing Communicative Intentions in Dialogue using a Collaborative
Nate Blaylock · 2002
In order to understand natural language, it is necessary to understand the intentions behind it, (i.e., why an utterance was spoken). We model dialogue as collaboration between agents. Communicative intentions can then be seen as how an agent is trying to affect the collaboration. Most previous work on intention-recognition approaches to dialogue has focused on only a small subset of agent collaboration paradigms (i.e., master-slave), and thus is unable to account for dialogues in other paradigms, such as mixed-initiative collaboration. Previous work has also either modeled dialogues where the agents are only planning or dialogues where agents are only acting. This restricts dialogue-model coverage to only those cases and does not model dialogues where collaboration about acting and planning occurs. .pp In this paper, we present a collaborative problem-solving model of dialogue. This model is able to account for a much wider array of dialogues than previous models have covered. It covers the spectrum of collaboration paradigms (from master-slave to mixed-initiative) as well as dialogues where interleaved acting and planning are taking place. .pp We propose, for future research, to complete this model and to build a domain-independent intention-recognition system based on it for use within the TRIPS dialogue system.