Dialogue Actions for Natural Language Interfaces

This paper presents an action scheme for dialogue management for natural language interfaces. The scheme guides a dialogue manager which directs the interface's dialogue with the user, communicates with the background system, and assists the interpretation and generation modules. The dialogue manager was designed on the basis of an investigation of empirical material collected in Wizard of Ozexperiments. The empirical investigations revealed that in dialogues with database systems users specify an object, or a set of objects, and ask for domain concept information, e.g. the value of a property of that object or set of objects. The interface responds by performing the appropriate action, e.g. providing the requested information or initiating a clarification subdialogue. The action to be carried out by the interface can be determined based on how objects and properties are specified from information in the user utterance, the dialogue context, and the response from the background system ..