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<Paper uid="W00-0309">
  <Title>Task-based dialog management using an agenda</Title>
  <Section position="3" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Spoken language interaction can take many forms. Even fairly simple interaction can be very useful, for example in auto-attendant systems.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> For many other applications, however, more complex interactions seem necessary, either because users cannot always be expected to exactly specify what they want in a single utterance (e.g., obtaining schedule information) or because the task at hand requires some degree of exploration of complex alternatives (e.g., travel planning). Additionally, unpredictable complexity is introduced through error or misunderstanding and the system needs to detect and deal with these cases. We are interested in managing interaction in the context of a goal-oriented task that extends oveg multiple tums. Dialog management in the context of purposeful tasks must solve two problems: (1) Keep track of the overall interaction with a view to ensuring steady progress towards task completion. That is, the system must have some idea of how much of the task has been completed and more importantly some idea of what is yet to be done, so that it can participate in the setting of intermediate goals and generally shepherd the interaction towards a successful completion of the task at hand. (2) Robustly handle deviations from the nominal progression towards problem solution. Deviations are varied: the user may ask for something that is not satisfiable (i. e., proposes a set of mutually-incompatible constraints), the user may misspeak (or, more likely, the system may misunderstand) a request and perhaps cause an unintended (and maybe unnoticed) deviation from the task. The user might also underspecify a request while the system requires that a single solution be chosen.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> Finally the user's conception of the task might deviate from the system's (and its developers) conception, requiring the system to alter the order in which it expects to perform the task.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> Ideally, a robust dialog management architecture can accommodate all of these circumstances within a single framework.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> We have been exploring dialog management issues in the context of the Communicator \[3\] task. The Communicator handles a complex travel task, consisting of air travel, hotels and car reservations.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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