A Plan Recognition Model for Subdialogues in Conversations

Previous plon-based models of dialogue understanding hove been unoble to occount for mony types of subdiologues present in noturolly occurring conversotions. One reason for this is that the models hove not clearly differentiated between the voroius woys thot on utterance con relote to a plan structure representing o topic. In this poper we present a plon-bosed theory that allows o wide variety of utterance-plan relotionships. We introduce a set of discourse plans, each one corresponding to o porticulor way that on utteronce con relote to o discourse topic, and distinguish such plans from the set of plans that ore octuolly used to model the topics. By incorporating knowledge obout discourse into o plon-bosed fromework. we con account for a wide variety of subdiologues while maintaining the computotionol odvontoges of the plon-bosed opprooch.