IDP - An Interactive Discourse Planner

We are building a system that plans text to describe and justify domain plans interactively. This paper focuses on the second task, plan justiication. A speaker uses plan justiication to have a listener adopt a recommended plan. The text plan that our system incremen-tally formulates and executes to justify its recommendation is represented uniformly in the same knowledge base with the domain plans that are under discussion. In this way, the text plan and the domain plans are both accessible for analyzing the listener's feedback. The system can interpret vaguely articulated questions, generate concise replies and metacomments, and detect feedback that initiates digressions. As a testbed for our model, we are implementing a system that gives driving directions and route advice interactively.