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The dialogue manager (DM) is responsible for interpreting each user
utterance in its appropriate context, issuing database queries, and
formulating responses to the user. The DM maintains a dialogue
state, which is transformed as a reaction to each incoming message
(from the language processors and the database agent). The dialogue
state consists of three data structures:
- a list of objects that have been introduced in
the course of the dialogue. An object may be a concrete train
or flight alternative proposed by the system, or a set of
constraints given by the user;
- the dialogue history, that is, the utterances up
to the current point in the dialogue;
- the agenda, that is, a stack of goals that the
dialogue manager is seeking to meet. The agenda encodes the
long-term objectives of the system.
The use of an agenda makes the system flexible, and it is easy to
quickly reconfigure the DM to try out different dialogue strategies.
Mats Wiren
Mon Oct 25 13:51:54 MET DST 1999