Toward a plan-based understanding model for mixed-initiative dialogues
Hiroaki Kitano, Carol Van Ess-Dykema · 1991
This paper presents an enhanced model of plan-based dialogue understanding. Most plan-based dialogue understanding models derived from [Litman and Allen, 1987] assume that the dialogue speakers have access to the same domain plan library, and that the active domain plans are shared by the two speakers. We call these features shared domain plan constraints. These assumptions, however, ae too strict to account for mixed-initiative dialogues where each speaker has a different set of domain plans that are housed in his or her own plan library, and where an individual speaker's domain plans may be activated at any point in the dialogue. We propose an extension to the Litman and Allen model by relaxing the shared domain plan constraints. Our extension improves (1) the ability to track the currently active plan, (2) the ability to explain the planning behind speaker utterances, and (3) the ability to track which speaker controls the conversational initiative in the dialogue.