A Collaborative Planning Model of Intentional Structure

An agent's ability to understand an utterance depends upon its ability to relate that utterance to the preceding discourse. The agent must determine whether the utterance begins a new segment of the discourse, completes the current segment, or contributes to it. The intentional structure of the discourse, comprised of discourse segment purposes and their interrelationships, plays a central role in this process (Grosz and Sidner 1986). In this paper, we provide a computational model for recognizing intentional structure and utilizing it in discourse processing. The model is based on the collaborative planning framework of SharedPlans (Grosz and Kraus 1996).