This paper describes the reliability of a dialogue structure coding scheme which is based on utterance function, game structure, and higher level transaction structure, and which has been applied to a corpus of spontaneous task-oriented spoken dialogues. 1.

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This paper presents empirical results comparing spoken and keyboard communication. It is shown that speakers attempt to achieve more detailed goals in giving instructions than do users of keyboards. One specific kind of fine-grained communicative act, a request that the hearer identify the referent of a noun phrase, is shown to dominate spoken instruction-giving discourse, but is nearly absent from keyboard discourse. Most important, these requests are only achieved "indirectly". - through utterances whose surface forms do not explicitly convey the speakers' intent. A plan-based theory of communication is shown to uncover the speakers' intentions underlying many cases of indirect identification requests found in the corpus, once an action for referent identification has been posited. In so doing, the theory demonstrates how intent (or plan) recognition can be applied in reasoning about the use of a description. As a consequence of this approach, it is shown that the conditions on the planning of successful identification requests account for Searle's conditions on the act of referring. It is concluded that intent recognition will need to be a central focus for pragmatics/discourse components of future speech understanding systems, and that computational linguistics needs to develop formalisms for reasoning about speakers' use of descriptions

This paper describes an application of APE (the Atlas Planning Engine), an integrated planning and execution system at the heart of the Atlas dialogue management system. APE controls a mixedinitiative dialogue between a human user and a host system, where turns in the 'conversation' may include graphical actions and/or written text. APE has full unification and can handle arbitrarily nested discourse constructs, making it more powerful than dialogue managers based on finitestate machines. We illustrate this work by describing Atlas-Andes, an intelligent tutoring system built using APE with the Andes physics tutor as the host.

This work is the first systematic investigation of initiative in human-human tutorial dialogue. We studied initiative management in two dialogue strategies: didactic tutoring and Socratic tutoring.

content does not reflect the position or policy of the government and no official endorsement should be inferred. 1 Evens et al. / CIRCSIM-Tutor... CIRCSIM-Tutor uses natural language for both input and output. It can handle a variety of syntactic constructions and lexical items, including sentence fragments and misspelled words. It conducts a conversation with a student to help the student learn to solve a class of problems in cardiovascular physiology dealing with the regulation of blood pressure. We describe the lessons learned about knowledge representation, input understanding and text generation and how they influence the design of the next generation of our text-based ITS, CIRCSIM-Tutor Version 3, now under construction. 1

. CIRCSIM-Tutor v. 3 is a natural-language based ITS for cardiac physiology. In this paper, we describe TIPS, a new text planning engine for CIRCSIM-Tutor based on current research in text generation. Since conversations cannot be completely planned in advance, TIPS plans and executes iteratively. It maintains a goal hierarchy for the tutor while carrying on a conversation with the student. It can handle multi-turn plans on the part of the tutor, and it can back up and replan when the student gives an unexpected answer. In this paper we sketch the design of TIPS using an analysis of human-to-human tutoring transcripts to shape the requirements. 1 Introduction The negative feedback loop which maintains a steady blood pressure in the human body is one of the more difficult topics for first-year medical students to master. CIRCSIM-Tutor v. 3 is the latest in a series of CAI systems intended to help students master the concepts involved. This paper describes TIPS, a new text planner for CI...

There is currently a broad interest in dialogue acts and dialogue act taxonomies, and new uses, taxonomies, and standardization efforts continue to be proposed. This paper presents a discussion of issues that must be addressed in order to facilitate the shared understanding and use of taxonomies. The discussion is framed in terms of 20 questions, the answers to which will help make the meanings of taxonomy elements more clear to different communities of users.

Managing tutorial dialogue is an intrinsically complex task that is only partially covered by current models of dialogue processing.

Task-oriented dialogues can normally be divided into subdialogues, each of which reflects collaboration on a particular substep of the task, and which we call `transactions'. We have devised a way of identifying transactions and their associated actions for HCRC Map Task dialogues, and we have tested the replicability of our coding scheme using naive subjects. Introduction Much work on dialogue has concentrated on dialogues arising from collaborative tasks. These dialogues are both easier to analyse than free-form conversations and more relevant to practical applications of humancomputer dialogue. At least from the participants' points of view, the most important issues are how to break the task into executable subtasks and what actions to perform and when. Comparatively little work has been done which relates participants' actions to what happens in the dialogue. During task-oriented dialogue, the participants form collaborative plans to reach a joint goal, transferring information b...