A process model for recognizing communicative acts and modeling negotiation subdialogues
Sandra Carberry, Lynn Lambert · 1999
Negotiation is an important part of task-oriented expert-consultation dialogues. This paper presents a plan-based model for understanding cooperative negotiation subdialogues. Our sys-tem infers both the communicative actions that people pursue when speaking and the beliefs underlying these actions. Beliefs, and the strength of these beliefs, are recognized from the surface form of utterances,from discourse acts, and from the explicit and implicit acceptance of previous utterances. Our algorithm for recognizing discourse actions combines linguistic, world, and con-textual knowledge in a unified framework. By combining these different knowledge sources, we are able to recognize complex discourse acts such as expressing doubt, to identify the relationship of utterances to one another, and to model negotiation subdialogues. Since negotiation is an inte-gral part of multiagent activity, our process model addresses an important aspect of cooperative interaction and thus is a step toward an intelligent and robust natural language consultation system.