Issues under negotiation

In this paper, we give an issue-based account of a simple kind of collaborative negotiative dialogue. We start from a previous formal account of negotiative dialogue (Sidner, 1994a) and argue for a slightly different idea of what negotiative dialogue is. We want to make a distinction between the process of accepting an utterance and its content, which applies to all utterances, and a concept of negotiation defined, roughly, as a discussion of several alternative solutions to some problem. This latter account is formulated in terms of Issues Under Negotiation (IUN), representing the question or problem to be resolved, and a set of alternative answers, representing the proposed solutions. We argue that this theory improves on certain aspects of Sidner’s account while also fitting into a question-based dialogue management framework which has previously been implemented in the GoDiS dialogue system (Bohlin et al., 1999). Work on this paper was supported by SIRIDUS (Specification, Interaction and Reconfiguration in Dialogue Understanding Systems), EC Project IST-199910516, and D’Homme (Dialogues in the Home Machine Environment), EC Project IST-2000-26280, and STINT (The Swedish Foundation for International Cooperation in Research and Higher Education). An extended presentation of this work appears in (Larsson, 2002). First, we will give a brief review of Sidner’s theory and discuss its merits and drawbacks. We then provide an alternative account based on the concept of Issues Under Negotiation. We explain how IUN can be added to GoDiS, and give an information state analysis of a simple negotiative dialogue. Finally, we draw some conclusions and point to possible future research areas.