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<Paper uid="P93-1039">
  <Title>RESPONDING TO USER QUERIES IN A COLLABORATIVE ENVIRONMENT*</Title>
  <Section position="3" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> In task-oriented consultation dialogues, the user and expert jointly construct a plan for achieving the user's goal.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> In such an environment, it is important that the agents agree on the domain plan being constructed and on the problem-solving actions being taken to develop it. This suggests that the participants communicate their disagreements when they arise lest the agents work on developing different plans. We are extending the dialogue understanding system in \[6\] to include a system that responds to the user's utterances in a collaborative manner.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> Each utterance by a participant constitutes a proposal intended to affect the agents' shared plan. One component of our architecture, the evaluator, examines the user's proposal and decides whether to accept or reject it. Since the user has knowledge about his/her particular circumstances and preferences that influence the domain plan and how it is constructed, the evaluator must be a reactive planner that interacts with the user to obtain information used in building the evaluation meta-plan. Depending on the evaluation, the system can accept or reject the proposal, or suggest what it considers to be a better alternative, leading to an embedded negotiation subdialogue.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> In addition to the evaluator, our architecture consists of a goal selector, an intentional planner, and a discourse realizer. The goal selector, based on the result of the evaluation and the current dialogue model, selects an appropriate intentional goal for the system to pursue. The intentional planner builds a plan to achieve the intentional goal, and the discourse realizer generates utterances to convey information based on the intentional plan.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> This paper describes the evaluator, concentrating on cases in which the system and user disagree. We show how the system determines that the user's proposed additions are erroneous and, instead of directly responding to the user's utterances, conveys the disagreement. Thus, our work contributes to an overall dialogue system by 1) extending the model in \[6\] to eliminate the assumption that the system will automatically answer the user's questions or follow the user's proposals, and 2) capturing the notion *This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. IRI-9122026.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5"> of cooperative responses within an overall collaborative framework that allows for negotiation.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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