A Few Dialogue Strategies - Man-Machine Dialogue: Design and Challenges - page 123

Chapter 8
A Few Dialogue Strategies
Dialogue management is often presented as the heart of the MMD system.
This is where all the machine understanding process results arrive, where all
the different information is compared, including that stored as the dialogue
progressed, where decisions are taken, which might involve a problem
resolution phase or a database information research phase, and where the
messages for the user are generated as an abstract form which is then
materialized by the modules in charge of automatic generation and synthesis.
As with each chapter of Part 2 of this topic, there is a process that requires
input arguments and returns output results. The first set of arguments covers
the prosodic, lexical, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic analysis results, in the
form of a representation of the meaning of the utterance, with all the
references being solved, and accompanied by a label pointing to the dialogue
act carried out. A second set of arguments covers the following resources
which are independently managed or linked (or even at an internal level) with
the dialogue manager: model of the task, objects and world in which the task
is carried out, dialogue history and user model. The visible result of dialogue
management is the system's choice of reaction. This reaction can be an action
in the world of application objects, an action which is thus displayed on
screen. It can be the visual presentation of information. It can also take the
shape of a linguistic utterance. In that case, the dialogue manager returns a
message in a form that indicates what to say, without going into the details of
how to say it, a process which the automatic generator takes charge of with