Abstract

We argue that meta-dialog and meta-reasoning, far from being of only occasional use, are the very essence of conversation and communication between agents. We give four paradigm examples of massive use of meta-dialog where only limited object dialog may be present, and use these to bolster our claim of centrality for meta-dialog. We further illustrate this with related work in active logics. We argue moreover This research has been supported in part by grants from the National Science Foundation and the Army Research Office. We thank Betsy Klipple, Tom Nelson, Clare Voss, and John Gurney for helpful discussion. y Institute for Advanced Computer Studies, University of Maryland. 1 that there may be a core set of meta-dialog principles that is in some sense complete, and that may correspond to the human ability to engage in "free-ranging" conversation. If we are right, then implementing such a set would be of considerable interest. We give examples of existing computer programs that converse inadequately according to our guidelines. 1

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