User-system dialogues and the notion of focus

In recent years, the capabilities of knowledge-based systems to communicate with their users have evolved from simple interactions to complex dialogues. With this evolution comes a need to understand what makes a good dialogue. In this paper, we are concerned with dialogue coherence. We review the notion of focus, which partly explains this property, and its use for user-system communication. First, we examine the major theories dealing with this notion. We describe what their contribution is and how they di€er. Then, we illustrate the bene®ts of using the notion of focus and especially the improvement in text coherence. We pay particular attention to how the notion can concretely be implemented. Its integration with other techniques and theories is described. We conclude the paper by pointing out remaining issues in the understanding of the notion of focus. The contribution of this paper is to provide a classi®cation of the theories of focus and to show the improvements they o€er in elaborate user-system dialogues.