Modeling human dialogue transactions in the context of declarative knowledge

The paper deals with an investigation and modeling of dialogue and dialogue transactions. An ontological model of human dialogue interaction, underlying follow-up reasoning, is obtained on the basis of analysis of human-human dialogues and illustrated by one of Plato’s dialogue Protagoras. In the sequel, attention is focused on one type of human-human dialogues, called erotetic dialogue and on the structure of erotetic dialogue transaction from the viewpoint of knowledge interchange within the transaction. A spectrum of formal models, oriented towards discovering the inner logical structure of erotetic transaction is offered. The distinguishing feature of all models is their orientation on language-independent entities representing declarative knowledge associated with a transaction’s elements.