Intentions are an important concept in Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science. We present a formal theory of intentions...

Spoken dialogue interfaces are finding usage in a number of important applications. Conversational moves are the atoms of the interaction between a user and the computer system. We are building a portable toolkit for constructing dialogue interfaces in different applications. Portability requires that we endow this toolkit with a wide range of conversational moves. The conversational moves conventionally studied apply well to the specific applications for which they were designed. However, traditional move-sets are too limited for a number of important situations when more general applications are considered. In particular, they are not well-suited to mixed-initiative dialogue, nor to prolonged dialogue, and lack authorizational, transactional, and presentational primitives to adapt to complex backend information systems. We have developed a fuller set of conversational moves based on the analysis of two different domains in database access and on the document retrieval application. 1...