1985 Reports

Taking the Initiative for System Goals in Cooperative Dialogue

Matthews, Kevin

We discuss the need for natural language systems to have a more flexible, conversational ability to interact with the user particularly for problem-solving dialogue. In particular, such systems need to have their own goals in addition to responding to the user's requests and the linguistic ability to manage such goals 10 the dialogue. We discuss some motivations for taking the initiative, the information necessary to do it, and present a partial solution to a subproblem. The approach is exemplified by output from our experimental dialogue ADVISOR which functions as an academic advisor to students.