Chapter 1 MANAGING COMMUNICATIVE INTENTIONS WITH COLLABORATIVE PROBLEM SOLVING ∗

Dialogue systems need to be able to understand a user’s communicative intentions, reason with those intentions, form their own communicative intentions, and realize those intentions with actual language to be uttered to the user. Oftentimes in dialogue systems, however, what these communicative intentions actually correspond to is never clearly defined. We propose a descriptive model of dialogue, based on collaborative problem solving, which defines communicative intentions as attempts to modify a shared collaborative problem-solving state between the user and system. Modeling dialogue at the level of collaborative problem solving allows us to model a wider array of dialogue types than previous models, including the range of collaboration paradigms (master-slave to mixed-initiative) and interaction types (planning, execution, and interleaved planning and execution). It also provides a definition for utterance-level communicative intentions for use within a dialogue system.