Speech act generation in cooperative dialogue

This paper presents a simple model for speech act generation in cooperative dialogue. Main goal of the dialogue is the collaborative exchange of information so that, if the information is available, in the final state the participants believe the answer to an initial question. The participants' communicative strategy is determined by the rules of the dialogue game. On the one hand, the rules regulate which speech act will be performed depending on a certain information state 'of one of the participants, aIlll, on the other hand, they dictate how an information state will change as a result of the performance of a particular speech act. The resulting structure of the information exchange can be complex, since the knowledge to find an answer to the initia! question may be distributed among the participants and may therefore result in subdialogues and the generation of counter-questions