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<Paper uid="W02-0216">
  <Title>Multi-tasking and Collaborative Activities in Dialogue Systems</Title>
  <Section position="3" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
2 Multi-tasking and Collaboration
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> A useful dialogue system for interaction with autonomous devices will enable collaboration with humans in the planning and execution of tasks. Dialogue will be used to specify and clarify instructions and goals for the device, to monitor its progress, and also to jointly solve problems. Before we deal with such issues in detail, we note that such devices also have the following properties which are relevant from the point of view of dialogue management: a0 Devices exist within dynamic environments, where new objects appear and are available for discussion. Device sensors may give rise to new information at any time, and this may need to be communicated urgently.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> a0 Devices may perform multiple concurrent activities which may succeed, fail, become cancelled, or be revised. These activities can be topics of conversation.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> (Allen et al., 2001) present a taxonomy of dialogue systems ranging from &amp;quot;finite-state script&amp;quot; dialogues for simple tasks (such as making a long-distance call) to the most complex &amp;quot;agent-based models&amp;quot; which cover dialogues where different possibilities, such as future plans, are discussed. Within this taxonomy, a useful dialogue system for interaction with autonomous devices must be located at or near the &amp;quot;agent-based&amp;quot; point since we wish to communicate with devices about their possible actions, their plans, and the tasks they are currently attempting. For these reasons we built a dialogue manager that represents (possibly collaborative) activities and their execution status, and tracks multiple threads of dialogue about concurrent and planned activities.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> For these sorts of reasons it is clear that form-filling or data-base query style dialogues (e.g. the CSLU Toolkit, (McTear, 1998)) will not suffice here (see (Elio and Haddadi, 1999; Allen et al., 2001) for similar arguments).</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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