The Use of Knowledge Preconditions in Language Processing

If an agent does not possess the knowledge needed to perform an action, it may privately plan to obtain the required information on its own, or it may involve another agent in the planning process by engaging it in a dialogue. In this paper, we show how the requirements of knowledge preconditions can be used to account for information-seeking subdialogues in discourse. We first present an axiomatization of knowledge preconditions for the SharedPlan model of collaborative activity [Grosz and Kraus, 1993], and then provide an analysis of information-seeking subdialogues within a general framework for discourse processing. In this framework, SharedPlans and relationships among them are used to model the intentional component of Grosz and Sidner’s [1986] theory of discourse structure.