The correction machine: a computer model of recognizing and producing belief justifications in argumentative dialogs
Alex Quilici · 1991
In discourse processing, the major problems are understanding the underlying connections between successive dialog utterances and producing coherent dialog responses. This dissertation presents a computer model that accomplishes these tasks for argumentative dialogs in which (1) each dialog response presents a belief, (2) each belief is presented to address some perceived disagreement, and (3) each belief is part of a justification for some other belief related to the dialog. In these dialogs, understanding a response involves relating a stated belief to beliefs appearing earlier in the dialog, and producing a response involves selecting a belief to justify and deciding upon the set of beliefs to provide as its justification. Our approach is knowledge based, using general, common-sense planning heuristics to recognize how a belief is being justified and to form new justifications for beliefs. This approach allows us to recognize and formulate novel belief justifications, a necessary capability for any system that participates cooperatively in dialogs involving disagreements. The model has been implemented in a computer program, The Correction Machine, that participates in dialogs in two disparate domains: arguing over the best way to perform everyday planning tasks such as keeping our Artificial Intelligence lab clean, and providing advice to novice UNIX users.