Taking Initiative in Response Generation

We present an approach to taking the initiative to provide unrequested but relevant information in responses to Yes-No questions. In our model, stimulus conditions represent types of discourse contexts in which a speaker would be motivated to provide unrequested information. Stimulus conditions can be thought of as situational triggers which give rise to new speaker goals, and which are the compiled result of "deeper" planning based upon intentional goals. Stimulus conditions are used as part of a discourse-plan based approach to response generation which enables the generation of coherent multiple-sentence responses, including indirect answers.