Using a Reactive Planner as the Basis for a Dialogue Agent
Reva Freedman · 2000
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...