Dialogue Management

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.

• Dialogue Moves
• The Dialogue Management Cycle