Using a Reactive Planner as the Basis for a Dialogue Agent

This paper describes APE (the Atlas Planning Engine), the reactive planner at the center of the Atlas dialogue management system. The goal of Atlas is to build conversation-based systems, where turns in the “conversation” may include graphical actions and/or text. Since APE can be used to generate a dialogue involving arbitrarily nested discourse constructs, it is more powerful than dialogue planners based on finite-state machines. Although it is intended largely to model dialogue containing hierarchical, multi-turn plans, APE can also be used as a general-purpose programming tool for implementing a dialogue system.