Computational Approaches to Dialogue
Traum. David · 2017
This chapter focuses on dialogue systems that include a dialogue management process, and can engage in dialogue. These systems may require profoundly different dialogue models from the above examples, since they have to be adequate not just for understanding dialogue, but also for providing information sufficient to decide what to say. Thus human-computer dialogue can often be much easier for a system to model than human-human dialogue. The chapter introduces human-computer dialogue, and looks at several orientations towards systems that can engage in dialogue, and several roles for computer dialogue systems. It reviews several organizing principles for dialogue systems, including what sort of information state they represent, and how they decide on next moves to make in dialogue. The chapter discusses some current challenge issues for dialogue systems. It briefly surveys some of the diversity of approaches to computational modeling dialogue and constructing systems that can engage in dialogue with users.