Interacting with Knowledge Based Systems through Dialogue Games

Approaches to text generation have emphasised the need to plan dialogues between user and computer, but have paid insufficient attention to the highly conventional nature of much human-human interaction. It is possible to conceive of certain classes of dialogues as highly rule-governed activities, and to do so facilitates the planning of such dialogues, by decreasing the reliance on a model of the user. One such class of dialogue is interactive argument, in which a topic is discussed with the aim of reaching a conclusion as to the truth of some proposition. We contend that interactive argument provides a useful model of interaction with a KBS, could provide a novel means of knowledge elicitation, and would serve as a fruitful model for educational systems also. Details of a dialogue manager based on a well known dialogue game (Mackenzie’s DC) are given. Since KBS will exist independently of this way of interacting with them we give details of a Dialogue Abstract Machine (DAM), which could serve as a target interface between our dialogue manager and a KBS of any formalism.