Dialogue systems need to be able to understand a user's communicative intentions, reason with those intentions, form their own communicative intentions, and realize those intentions with actual language to be uttered to the user. Oftentimes in dialogue systems, however, what these communicative intentions actually correspond to is never clearly defined. We propose a descriptive model of dialogue, based on collaborative problem solving, which defines communicative intentions as attempts to modify a shared collaborative problem-solving state between the user and system. Modeling dialogue at the level of collaborative problem solving allows us to model a wider array of dialogue types than previous models, including the range of collaboration paradigms (master-slave to mixed-initiative) and interaction types (planning, execution, and interleaved planning and execution). It also provides a definition for utterance-level communicative intentions for use within a dialogue system.

Personal assistants need to allow the user to interact with the system in a flexible and adaptive way such as through spoken language dialogue. In this research we focus on an application in which the user can use a variety of devices to interact with a collection of personal assistants each specializing in a task domain such as email or calendar management, information seeking, etc. We propose an agent-based approach for developing the dialogue manager that acts as the central point maintaining continuous user-system interaction and coordinating the activities of the assistants. In addition, this approach enables development of multi-modal interfaces. We describe our initial implementation which contains an email management agent that the user can interact with through a spoken dialogue and an interface on PDAs. The dialogue manager was implemented by extending a BDI agent architecture.

This paper describes a distributed dialogue management scheme for speechbased information seeking dialogue.

this paper, we describe a generation system for virtual humans (Rickel et al. 2002), in a story-based multicharacter Virtual-reality training system (Swartout et al. 2001). Generation for these characters puts additional constraints beyond those of most dialogue systems. The language produced must be appropriate for the character's role in the interactive experience, expressing emotions as well as beliefs and goals. The characters must also be able to speak to multiple addressees, tailoring language for each. The agents also need to be able to express content using both speech and visual modalities

This paper presents a novel framework for building symbol-level control modules of animated agents and robots having a spoken dialogue interface. It features distributed modules called experts each of which is specialized to perform certain kinds of tasks. A common interface that all experts must support is specified, and any kind of expert can be incorporated if it has the interface. Several modules running in parallel coordinate the experts by accessing them through the interface, so that the whole system can achieve flexible control, such as interruption handling and parallel task execution. 1

This paper introduces SesaME, a generic dialogue management framework, especially designed for supporting dynamic multidomain dialogue processing. SesaME supports a multitude of highly distributed applications and facilitates simultaneous adaptation to individual users and their environment. The dynamic multi-domain dialogue processing is supported through the use of standardised and highly distributed domain descriptions. For fast, runtime handling of these domain descriptions a specially developed, dynamic plug and play solution is employed. In this paper, a description of how SesaME's functionality is evaluated within the framework of the PER demonstrator is also presented.

Project funded by the European Community under the Sixth Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development The deliverable identification sheet is to be found on the reverse of this page. Project ref. no. Project acronym Project full title

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