Conversational Games‚ Belief Revision and Bayesian Networks
Stephen Pulman · 1997
The paper uses a simple and abstract characterization of dialogue in terms of mental state changes of dialogue participants to raise three fundamental questions for any theory of dialogue. It goes on to discuss currently popular accounts of dialogue with respect to these three questions. Next, the notion of `conversational game' is revisited within a probabilistic and decision theoretic framework, and it is argued that such an interpretation is plausible both intuitively and as the basis for computational implementation. An illustrated sketch of a proposed implementation using Bayesian networks is described. Three Questions for Dialogue A simple, rather abstract description of a canonical dialogue is that it consists of a sequence of utterances with a corresponding sequence of mental states of the participants in the dialogue. Person A has a sequence of mental states SA1 . . . SAn+1 and person B also has a sequence SB1 . . . SBn+1 . Connecting these two sequences is a third sequence, ...