A Process Model for Recognizing Communicative Acts and Modeling Negotiation Subdialogues

Negotiation is an important part of task-oriented expert-consultation dialogues. This paper presents a plan-based model for understanding cooperative negotiation subdialogues. Our system infers both the communicative actions that people pursue when speaking and the beliefs underlying these actions. Beliefs, and the strength of these beliefs, are recognized from the surface form of utterances,from discourse acts, and from the explicit and implicit acceptance of previous utterances. Our algorithm for recognizing discourse actions combines linguistic, world, and contextual knowledge in a unified framework. By combining these different knowledge sources, we are able to recognize complex discourse acts such as expressing doubt, to identify the relationship of utterances to one another, and to model negotiation subdialogues. Since negotiation is an integral part of multiagent activity, our process model addresses an important aspect of cooperative interaction and thus is a step toward an intelligent and robust natural language consultation system.