Empirical Specification of Dialogue Games for an Interactive Agent

This article addresses the challenge of designing the communicative behaviour of an agent interacting with humans. We present a data-driven methodology based on the production of a matrix representation of a corpus from which we extract dialogue patterns. These patterns reflect the minimal units of interaction which turn out to be very attractive for dialogue modelling. We present a framework to specify dialogue games from these patterns based on the notion of social commitments. We exemplify the specification of dialogue games by implementing all the steps of our methodology on a task-oriented corpus. The produced games are validated by showing that they appropriately describe the patterns appearing in a reference corpus.