Resolving Plan Ambiguity for Response Generation

A b s t r a c t Recognizing the plan underlying a query aids in the generation of an appropriate response. In this paper, we address the problem of how to generate cooperative responses when the user's plan is ambiguous. We show that it is not always necessary to resolve the ambiguity, and provide a procedure that estimates whether the ambiguity matters to the task of formulating a response. If the ambiguity does matter, we propose to resolve the ambiguity by entering into a clarification dialogue with the user and provide a procedure that performs this task. Together, these procedures allow a question-answering system to take advantage of the interactive and collaborative nature of dialogue in recognizing plans and resolving ambiguity.