Issue-based Dialogue Management¶

The goal of all practical dialogue is to communicate information which is useful in some activity. This means that conversational goals should describe missing information, and to fulfil a conversational goal, what we need to do is to communicate the missing information. Issues, or questions, are essentially entities specifying certain pieces of as-yet-unavailable information. That is, conversational goals can to a large extent be modelled as questions.

The issue-based approach to dialogue management has proven very useful for implementing important mechanisms dealing with general (cross-domain) aspects of dialogue, such as inquiry-oriented dialogue interactions, dealing with multiple simultaneous tasks, sharing information between tasks, grounding, interactive communication management, question accommodation, belief revision, action-oriented dialogue, and negotiative dialogue.