<?xml version="1.0" standalone="yes"?>
<Paper uid="P04-2002">
  <Title>Minimizing the Length of Non-Mixed Initiative Dialogs</Title>
  <Section position="1" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="abstr">
    <SectionTitle>
Abstract
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Dialog participants in a non-mixed initiative dialogs, in which one participant asks questions exclusively and the other participant responds to those questions exclusively, can select actions that minimize the expected length of the dialog.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> The choice of question that minimizes the expected number of questions to be asked can be computed in polynomial time in some cases.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> The polynomial-time solutions to special cases of the problem suggest a number of strategies for selecting dialog actions in the intractable general case. In a simulation involving 1000 dialog scenarios, an approximate solution using the most probable rule set/least probable question resulted in expected dialog length of 3.60 questions per dialog, as compared to 2.80 for the optimal case, and 5.05 for a randomly chosen strategy.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
class="xml-element"></Paper>