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<Paper uid="E91-1041">
  <Title>A DIALOGUE MANAGER USING INITIATIVE-RESPONSE UNITS AND DISTRIBUTED CONTROL</Title>
  <Section position="10" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="concl">
    <SectionTitle>
8 Summary
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> I have presented an architecture for dialogue manageme~t for naturallanguage interfaces to various applications. The dialogue manager operates as a controller of resources for parsing, instantiation, generation and data-base access.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> :The design of the dialogue manager is based on the analysis of a corpus of simulated human-computer interactions. Unlike plan-based proposals which employ user intentions to guide the interaction, the dialogue manager described here uses plans with information about prototypical interaction patterns. The plans are modelled in - 237 dialogue objects which also contain static information for representing the dialogue.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> The dialogue objects are hierarchically structured in three categones: dialogue, initiative-response and move. The initiative-response category is recursive. Use of an initiative-response structure can be criticised in the same way as adjacency pairs for not adequately describing a naturally occurring discourse. However, for a restricted sublanguage, such as natural language communication with computers, we believe that this is a very efficient way of managing the dialogue (cf. Levinson 1981:114).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> The dialogue history is represented in a dialogue tree consisting of instantiated dialogue objects. The resources access the dialogue tree through a scoreboard and thus need no mechanisms for traversing the tree.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> We have conducted experiments which show that in an information-seeking human-computer dialogue the proposed mechanisms can correctly handle the dialogue.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5"> Empirical tests will show how many different interaction settings we can handle.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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