Natural Language Generation without Intentions

Response generation for natural language interfaces can not be seen as an isolated activity. It must be designed to facilitate cooperative user-friendly interaction. One important source of information for such a natural language generator is a model of the ongoing dialogue. There are two major approaches to dialogue modeling. One approach is based on reasoning about the goals and intentions behind a user initiative, whereas the other relies on a dialogue grammar specified from the functional role of a move. The latter approach does not allow reasoning on user intentions and goals, and will often produce less sophisticated responses. On the other hand, identifying a user’s goals and intentions is not a straightforward task; furthermore, the intention-based approach relies on complex plan recognition. For many natural language applications the grammar-based approach is sufficient and it is not necessary to recognize the intentions behind a user initiative. However, if the goal is to mimic human interaction a grammar-based approach will not be accurate enough.