1 Dialogue and Compound Contributions

This chapter introduces the phenomenon of compound contributions in dialogue and discusses their implications for NLG in interactive systems. Contributions to dialogue are often split across multiple utterances – possibly by different speakers – with each adding to an incrementally emerging representation of meaning. A suitable NLG module must therefore not only behave incrementally – able to use and extend existing partial representations – but must also be tightly integrated with an equally incremental interpretation module. We examine the different aspects of incrementality required, and see that no previous approach to incremental NLG provides them all; we outline one possible approach that does.