Limited enquiry negotiation dialogues

We define a new dialogue management strategy Limited Enquiry Negotiation Dialogues designed for enabling simple man-machine dialogues in which the parameters (for which the user will supply values) of a query to a database are negotiated. The choice of which query to make next is also not pre-ordained. The strategy is simple and intuitive but permits interestingly complex dialogue behaviour. We propose it as an addition to a dialogue designer’s standard components toolbox along with other well-known ideas such as menu-traversal and slot-filling. We illustrate the strategy by examining how it accounts for interesting but by no means rare data in a Wizard of Oz corpus of business trip planning dialogues. Finally, we discuss some more theoretical issues arising from the model.