The Dialog Manager

The intelligent multimedia component is responsible for the direct interaction with the user and serves as a mediator between problem solver and human decision maker. The dialog manager needs to handle user inputs by translating them into appropriate queries and on the output side it is faced with the challenging task of information presentation to convey the results of the internal reasoning processes. In order to manage the dynamics between user and decision support system, an even higher level of dialog control is required. The dialog manager has to structure the interaction to exhibit adequate context-sensitive dialog behaviour. Multimedia dialogs can be considered as a sequence of communicative acts to achieve certain goals. In this view, dialog control is concerned with the recognition and planning of communicative acts and information presentation can be characterized as a goal-directed activity aiming at the realization of a complex communicative act.