Cognitive Architecture of an Agent for Human-Agent Dialogues

This paper proposes a cognitive architecture of an intelligent agent that can have a dialogue with a human agent on health-related topics. This architecture consists of four main components, namely, the Belief Base, the Dialogue Manager, the Task Manager and the Plan Generator. Each component has sub-components that perform a set of tasks for the purpose to enable the agent to be enrolled in a dialogue. In this paper the particular sub-component of the Dialogue Manager, the Dialogue Strategy has been discussed in detail. A notion of scheme is introduced, which functions as a template with variables that are instantiated each time a state is entered. The agent's dialogue strategy is implemented as a combination of the schemes and the state transitions that the agent makes in response to the human's request. We used a combination of nite-state and agent-based dialogue strategies for dialogue management. This combined dialogue strategy enables a multi-topic dialogue between a human and an agent.