Hierarchical Consultation Dialogue
Eric J. Werner · 2000
In this paper we sketch a model of the stages involved in a consultation dialogue for a single goal. The model is applied to investment consultation. It is indicated how the model might be extended to deal with the more complex case of portfolio consultation. Together, the models provide instances of general conversational stragegies that guide and structure dialogues. I. Introduction In the process of consultation we are faced with the problem of dialogue control. What is to be said next cannot simply be deduced from a model of the user wants. Rather we need more global conversational strategies. Global conversational strategies can be viewed as linguistic strategies that are part of the conversational participants' overall intentional state [Werner 88a]. In this paper we describe a framework that extends dialogue control beyond the one step at a time deductive dialogue control mechanism underlying WISBER [Bergmann & Gerlach 87], [Cohen and Perrault 1979] as well as [Appelt 851. We do so by modeling the dialogue strategy directly by indicating its overall structure. In this paper we restrict our investigation to an outline of a particular conversational strategy that appears to govern some kinds of consultations. We focus on investment consultations [See Liermann and Messing 88 for a descriptive approach]. For the general theoretical and logical foundations see [Grosz 85 and Werner 88a1. At various points in the dialogue the system must decide when to issue an assertion and when to make a suggestion. The informative statement Bonds have a higher interest rate than