Incremental Information State Updates in an Obligation-Driven Dialogue Model

We sketch the outlines of a dialogue model using discourse obligations in a formal framework of information states. We propose a set of practical inference rules which incrementally update information states and assign intentional structures to sequences of dialogue moves. In this way we show that an obligation-driven approach can account for a wide range of phenomena which are assumed to be crucial for modelling any kind of dialogue. In particular, our analysis will focus on providing a treatment of questions and assertions in dialogue, thus covering some of the basic reasoning processes involved in information-oriented interaction.