A Few Dialogue Strategies - Man-Machine Dialogue: Design and Challenges - page 132

journey?” and does not put the user in a position in which he/she does not
know what to say.
When the user generates an assertion, such as, for example, “I do not have
a senior discount card”, this is the point where the system must prove it is
able to manage a dialogue: an assertion contributes a seemingly new piece
of information to the system or it is useless, and this newness must trigger
inferences. On the basis of these inferences, and on what has already been said
and what both speaker and hearer know, the system should understand if the
assertion is filling a lack which was blocking a situation, which the inferences
unblock and will allow the system to know what to answer, or, on the contrary,
if the assertion should incite the system to suggest something such as “let us
see if you can get one. How old are you?”.
Moreover, a user's utterance, no matter its speech act, can cause the
system to react in an unexpected manner, for example when it is unable to
solve an ambiguity on a referent or simply unable to understand the utterance.
In this case again, there are various dialogue strategies available. Denis
[DEN 08, p. 43] is particularly interested in detecting issues in system
robustness and comes to suggest dialogue strategies in the cases where there
are compound issues. Thus, a classical vision of ambiguity management
consists of choosing among the alternatives, even if the wrong choice is
made, rather than commit to a clarification sub-dialogue which might give a
negative image of the system and also lower the chances of quickly satisfying
the task. Making up an error on a referent can indeed end up being quicker
than a clarification sub-dialogue. Denis adds a phenomenon to this vision that
was observed in corpus and has not been much studied in MMD, i.e. the case
in which the clarification request itself is the source of incomprehension or of
a divergence of interpretation between user and system, which can lead to an
inextricable situation. The existence of this possibility reinforces the
relevance of the strategy which is to force the system to choose.
8.2. Technical aspects of dialogue management
8.2.1. Dialogue management and control
It is not easy to break down the dialogue management process into tasks.
Many approaches have come one after the other, and it is hard to place them
in relation to each other given the diversity of settings used and the overlap
between processes. In general, dialogue management groups three phases that