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<Paper uid="W00-1012">
  <Title>Dialogue Management in the Agreement Negotiation Process: A Model that Involves Natural Reasoning</Title>
  <Section position="1" start_page="0" end_page="102" type="abstr">
    <SectionTitle>
Abstract
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> In the paper we describe an approach to dialogue management in the agreement negotiation where one of the central roles is attributed to the model of natural human reasoning. The reasoning model consists of the model of human motivational sphere, and of reasoning algorithms. The reasoning model is interacting with the model of communication process. &amp;quot;/'he latter is considered as rational activity where central role play the concepts of communicative strategies and tactics.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Introduction Several researches have modelled the process of argument negotiation in cooperative dialogue where one participant makes a proposal to another participant and as the result of negotiation this is accepted or rejected.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> Chu-Carroll and Carberry (1998) present a cooperative response-generation model as a recursive cycle Propose-Evaluate-Modify. They concentrate on dialogues of information sharing and negotiation. An information sharing dialogue is started, when the agent recognised a turn of his/her partner as a proposal, but does not have enough information to decide whether to accept it or not. A negotiation dialogue is started, when the agent concludes that the proposal is in conflict with his/her beliefs and preferences, i.e. tends to reject it.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> Heeman and Hirst (1995) model cooperation by the cycle Present-Judge-Refashion. They use two levels of modelling - planning and cooperation. On the first level utterances are generated and interpreted, on the second level the cooperation of agents is modelled, relating it to agent's mental states and planning processes. The Shared Plans cooperation model deals with planning processes in which participate multiple agents, see Lochbaurn (1998). The model concentrates on group tasks that can be divided into separate, but interacting subtasks, and the central problem is coordination of intentions and goals of partners.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> Di Eugenio et al. (2000) present a model BalanceProposeDispose: first, the relevant information concerning the task is considered and discussed, then a proposal is made and, lastly, the decision concerning the proposal is made - it is accepted or rejected.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5"> In our model we depart from the same type of situation. One agent, A, addresses another agent, B, with the intention that B will carry out an action D. After some negotiation, B agrees or rejects the proposal.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="6"> In this paper we concentrate on the problems connected with modelling participants as conversation agents who are able to participate in negotiation in the form of natural dialogue dialogue that is carried out in natural language and according to the rules of human communication.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="7"> Such a dialogue can be considered as rational behaviour which is based on beliefs, wants and intentions of agents, at the same time being restricted by their resources, see Jokinen (1995), Webber (2000). Conversation agent is a kind of intelligent agent - a computer program that is able to communicate with humans as another human being.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="8"> As it is generally accepted, in a model of conversation agent it is necessary to represent its cognitive states as well as cognitive processes.  One of the most well-known models of this type is the BDI model, see Allen (1994).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="9"> Our main point in this paper is that the general concepts of cognitive states and processes used in BDI-type models should be extended in order to include certain factors from human motivational sphere and certain social principles in order to guarantee naturalness of dialogues of the type we are concerned with. This is especially important in connection with the fact that interest in modelling cooperative dialogues where partners are pursuing a common goal has considerably increased in recent years. On the one hand, this is connected with rapid spreading of Internet-based services. On the other hand, the interest in models of full natural dialogue derives from the possibility of building speech interfaces with different knowledge and databases, see Dybkjaer (2000). Both of these developments broaden the concept of naturalness of dialogue considerably and present to it much stronger requirements concerning its empirical adequacy as it has been generally accepted thus far.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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