Classical Planning and Causal Implicatures

In this paper we motivate and describe a dialogue manager (called Frolog) which uses classical planning to infer causal implicatures. A causal implicature is a type of Gricean relation implicature, a highly context dependent form of inference. As we shall see, causal implicatures are important for understanding the structure of task-oriented dialogues. Such dialogues locate conversational acts in contexts containing both pending tasks and the acts which bring them about. The ability to infer causal implicatures lets us interleave decisions about “how to sequence actions” with decisions about “when to generate clarification requests”; as a result we can model task-oriented dialogue as an interactive process locally structured by negotiation of the underlying task. We give several examples of Frolog-human dialog, discuss the limitations imposed by the classical planning paradigm, and indicate the potential relevance of our work for other relation implicatures.