The "Information-state" Approach to Dialogue Management: Some Results from the TRINDI Project

Dr. David Traum
UMIACS
University of Maryland

2:00pm Friday April 7, 2000
Lecture Hall III, Administration Building

In this talk, I will present some of the work of the European TRINDI Project (http://www.ling.gu.se/research/projects/trindi/) on dialogue management. The approach is to view dialogue management as maintaining the state of information involved in dialogue, rather than simpler notions of "dialogue state" or more procedural plan-based systems. Information state is seen as having the following components (which differ in detail depending on the theory of dialogue processing): informational components, formal representations of the components, a set of dialogue moves, a set of update rules, and an update strategy. The PTT theory of information state, dealing with grounding and a social approach involving obligations and commitments will be given as an example. The TRINDI project is also producing a toolkit (called TRINDIKIT) for building dialogue systems using the information state approach. An outline of this kit, as well as some examples of systems built using this kit will be presented (including EDIS, which uses the PTT theory of information states to engage in transaction-style dialogues).