Achieving Goals in Collaboration: Analysis of Estonian Institutional Calls

Estonian institutional calls are analyzed with the further aim to develop a dialogue system. The analysis is based on the Estonian Dialogue Corpus. Four types of dialogues are considered: calls to travel agencies and outpatients’ offices, ordering a taxi, and directory inquiries. A customer’s goal is either to get information or to trigger an action by the operator. This goal is achieved in collaboration with the operator. Sub-dialogues are initiated both by the customer and operator in order to achieve sub-goals of the initial goal. A stack is an appropriate data structure for saving goals and sub-goals.