Using Collaborative Discourse Theory to Partially Automate Dialogue Tree Authoring

We have developed a novel methodology combining hierarchical task networks with traditional dialogue trees that both partially automates dialogue authoring and improves the degree of dialogue structure reuse. The key to this methodology is a lightweight utterance semantics derived from collaborative discourse theory, making it a step towards dialogue generation based on cognitive models rather than manual authoring. We have implemented an open-source tool, called Disco for Games (D4g), to support the methodology and present a fully worked example of using this tool to generate a dialogue about baseball.