The Natural Language System HAM-RPM as a Hotel Manager: Some Representational Prerequisites

The dialogue system HAM-RPM simulates a person conversing about one of several interchangeable scenes in colloquial German. Attention is currently being focused on a hotel reservation situation in which the system is required to construct and make use of a model of its dialogue partner's goals and beliefs. This situation calls for a semantic representation language which is declarative and which permits the representation, among other things, of various numerical and natural language quantifiers, conjoined noun phrases and belief modifiers. This paper describes this language and sketches the processes in the course of which expressions of the language are analysed, constructed, transformed, or evaluated. The system's behavior is described in detail to illustrate the relationships among these processes.