A Declarative Model of Dialog
Susan McRoy, Syed Sumera Ali · 2000
The general goal of our work is to investigate com-putational models of dialog that can support ef-fective interaction between people and computer systems. We are particularly interested in the use of dialog for training and education. To support effective communication, dialog systems must fa-cilitate users ’ understanding by incrementally pre-senting only the most relevant information, by evaluating users ’ understanding, and by adapting the interaction to address communication prob-lems as they arise. Our model provides a speci-fication and representation of the linguistic, inten-tional, and social information that influence how people understand and respond in an ongoing dia-log and an architecture for combining this informa-tion. We represent knowledge uni/ormly in a sin-gle, declarative, logical language where the inter-pretation and performance of communicative acts in dialog occurs as a result of reasoning.