Representations of Dialogue State for Domain and Task Independent Meta-Dialogue

We propose a representation of local dialogue context motivated by the need to react appropriately to meta-dialogue, such as various sorts of corrections to the sequence of an instruction and response action. Such context includes at least the following aspects: the words and linguistic structures uttered, the domain correlates of those linguistics structures, and plans and actions in response. Each of these is needed as part of the context in order to be able to correctly interpret the range of corrections. Partitioning knowledge of dialogue structure in this way may lead to an ability to represent generic dialogue structure (e.g., in the form of axioms), which can be particularized to the domain, topic and content of the dialogue