In this paper, we describe our first efforts at building a domain-independent dialogue manager based on a theory of collaborative problems solving. We describe the implemented dialogue manager and look critically at what level of domain independence was achieved and what remains to be done.

We present our ongoing work towards using the concept of transactivity [1] for automatically assessing learning of students working together in a collaborative setting. Transactive segments of student dialogue are proposed as useful components of conversation summaries generated for instructors. Experimental evaluation of this hypothesis shows promising results. Further, initial results are pre...

The goal of this research is to develop an architecture that can guide an agent during collaborative teamwork. The architecture should generate communication and dialogue during the performance of collaborative multi-agent tasks as a byproduct of the agent’s rationally pursuing its intentions. This paper describes how a joint intention interpreter that is integrated with a reasoner over beliefs...

We study a symmetric collaborative dialogue setting in which two agents, each with private knowledge, must strategically communicate to achieve a common goal. The open-ended dialogue state in this setting poses new challenges for existing dialogue systems. We collected a dataset of 11K human-human dialogues, which exhibits interesting lexical, semantic, and strategic elements. To model both str...

This report reviews the state of the art research in Dialogue Management (DM) Systems. Dialogue systems have been around since the 1960’s, the best known are conversation programs such as Eliza (Weizenbaum 1966) and Parry (Colby 1973). The approaches we describe are categorised as follows: finite state/dialogue grammars, plan-based and collaborative; however, this division is not perfect, since...

In today’s networked environment, online forums emerge as a popular form of social structures that provides greater opportunities for learning from external resources without pre-established knowledge network. However, our inquiries in online forums do not always generate knowledge desideratum satisfactorily. A few recent studies noticed that communication practices become a means to characteri...

Empirical studies and theory suggest that educational dialogue can be used to support learners in the development of reasoning, critical thinking and argumentation. This paper presents an educational design for synchronous online peer discussion that guides student dialogue in ways that lead to improved argumentation and collaborative knowledge development. This design includes a mediating inte...

Collaborative completions are among the strongest evidence that dialogue requires coordination even at the sub-sentential level; the study of sentence completions may thus shed light on a number of central issues both at the `macro’ level of dialogue management and at the `micro’ level of the semantic interpretation of utterances. We propose a treatment of collaborative completions in PTT, a th...

This paper will present a review of design-based research conducted over the past 10 years that has modeled and promoted students’ reasoning, conceptual change and argumentative dialogue processes and practices through designing a number of digital dialogue games. This line of work was inspired by some challenges and insights that emerged during projects dealing with conceptual change in scienc...

This paper presents a model of collaborative discourse which integrates problem-solving, discourse, dialogue initiative and connict resolution. Experimental evidence obtained from an implementation of this theory demonstrates the eeectiveness of dialogue initiative and connict resolution within the model. 1 Motivation Two recently implemented voice dialogue systems utilize the principle that di...