Collaborative Response Generation in Planning Dialogues

In collaborative planning dialogues, the agents have different beliefs about the domain and about each other; thus, it is inevitable that conflicts arise during the planning process. In this paper, we present a plan-based model for response generation during collaborative planning, based on a recursive Propose-Evaluate-Modify framework for modeling collaboration. We focus on identifying strategies for content selection when 1) the system initiates information-sharing to gather further information in order to make an informed decision about whether to accept a proposal from the user, and 2) the system initiates collaborative negotiation to negotiate with the user to resolve a detected conflict in the user's proposal. When our model determines that information-sharing should be pursued, it selects a focus o f in formation-sharing from among multiple uncertainties that might be addressed, chooses an appropriate information-sharing strategy, and formulates a response that initiates an information-sharing subdialogue. When our model determines that conflicts must be resolved, it selects the most effective conflicts to address in resolving disagreement about the user's proposal, identifies appropriate justification for the system's claims, and formulates a response that initiates a negotiation subdialogue.