Reasoning about Coherent and Cooperative System Responses

This paper discusses the planning of system responses in information-seeking dialogues. Many dialogue systems are capable of answering single questions or carrying out dialogues which have fairly xed structures, but they show little or no capability to continue the dialogue in an intelligent way, if something unexpected takes place. Our system aims to be exible and overcome the shortcomings in its knowledge base by contextual reasoning that deals with the enablements and requirements for communication. Dialogue is regarded as a negotiation and the most appropriate response in the context is determined by communicative principles that are considered as constraints on cooperative and coherent communication. The prototype system is based on the knowledge base update procedure developed by Guessoum and Lloyd (1990, 1991), and it is a part of the Dialogue Manager in the PLUS system.