Cooperation in Dialogue and Discourse Structure

Dealing with dialogues requires developing different levels of interpretation. An intention-based analysis must take into account discourse conventions and communication phenomena which shall result in coherent cooperative dialogues. The realisation of such a system is possible by distributing the tasks to independent agents. We show that the collaboration of these agents is possible by building and using a dialogue representation whose structure and content integrate the results of the different agents. The structure is dynamically built and is based on an intentional analysis. But to go further than only a plan-based approach, the basic units are communicative intentions and exchanges are finely structured. Thus the structure can also be used to handle conversational obligations. Since comprehension problems affect the form of a dialogue, a decomposition in precise units also allows reasoning on the structure itself to evaluate the progress of a dialogue and to detect communication problems.