Organizing Dialogue From An Incoherent Stream Of Goals

-Human discourse appears coherent when it refleets coherent human thought. However, computers do not necessarily store or process information in the same way that people do a.ud~ therefore, cannot rely on the structure of their reuouing for the structure of thehr dialogue,s. Instead, computer-generated conversation must rely on some other mechanism for its orgsaiisation. In this paper, we discuss one such mechanism. We describe a template that provides a guide for conversation. The template is built from schemata representing discourse convention. As goals arrive from the problem solver they are added to the template. Because accepted discourse structures are used to connect a new goal to the existing template, goals are organiaed into sub-groups that follow conventional, coherent patterns of discourse. We present JUDIS, an interface to a distributed problem solver that uses this approach to organise dialogues f~om an incoherent stream of goals.