Recognizing Preliminary Sentences in Dialogue Interpretation

. In traditional plan-based dialogue interpretation systems, speech-acts are directly used for identifying the speaker's domain plans and little analysis is performed of the role of sentences in dialogue. This may lead to the activation of a large number of hypotheses on an agent's domain plans. In this paper, we describe how to interpret background sentences occurring in a dialogue by using knowledge coming from the linguistic and domain levels, and from a model of the user. We consider two kinds of utterances: the first one justifies the performance of subsequent speech-acts; the second represents information to be used for constraining the interpretation process of the other speech-act. 1 Introduction People often open dialogues with some background information. Sometimes, this information is given to make the interpretation of the other utterances easier for their interlocutors; other times, background information is used to justify the subsequent speech acts, or to check whether ..