Editing Speech Acts: A Practical Approach to Human-Machine Dialogue

This paper introduces a new approach to dialogue. This approach is based on the idea that dialogue can be seen as a form of two-person knowledge base editing. In a dialogue, it is the dialogue history which is being edited. We propose some constraints on editing dialogue histories which distinguish dialogue from knowledge base editing in general. We claim that our proposal yields both interesting conceptual insights into the nature of dialogue, and provides a starting point for building practically feasible dialogue systems. A first prototype of such a dialogue system has been developed. We provide a description