Inferring and Negotiating User Goals: Adaptive Dialogue Planning Using Abduction

This paper presents an approach to adaptive dialogue planning in the framework of an intelligent information retrieval system (MIRACLE), which provides semantic access to multimedia information via a WWW interface. The system uses abduction to infer users, interests and dialogue goals: ambiguous user queries are interpreted with respect to the semantic domain model and unexpected dialogue acts are interpreted in light of the actual dialogue history. On the basis of these interpretations the system initiates a clarification dialogue offering the user suitable follow-up moves for continuing the dialogue. Depending on the user,s choice, the system adapts its dialogue strategy/plan for the next steps.