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The user's following utterance, “how long with this itinerary which seems
shorter?” creates all the issues which we have described in the chapters in
Part 2 of this topic, and gives rise here to new questions: what does this
utterance contribute on the mental states and started plan? By interpreting the
utterance, the system first realizes that its intervention has been understood:
the user has indeed seen the suggested alternatives because he/she is asking a
question on one of them. There is thus a grounding of the system's answer.
Moreover, the question leads to the identification in the applicative database
of the property of an itinerary, and the assessment of the comment leads the
system to carry out a comparison based on the itineraries' properties. This
assessment is triggered because the system has decided that the comment was
actually a question through an indirect speech act. If this indirect question is
relevant, it has to answer it, and thus needs to compare the lengths. After this
comparison, the system knows that yes, the itinerary the user pointed at is
indeed shorter than the other displayed itineraries, that is the shortest solution.
It can thus answer the indirect question. As it has been expressed as a
comment, the system manages in parallel the belief linked to it, that is the
user believes that this itinerary is probably the shortest. At this point, the
user's mental states have been updated as has the dialogue history, and
the system is faced with several facts: it knows the answer to the direct
question, it knows the answer to the indirect question and it is still trying to
satisfy the user by inciting him/her to choose, quickly if possible. This can
lead the system, in the example which appears in the introduction, to generate
the answer “twenty minutes”. The answer is rather short, but matches the
system's decision to answer the first act quickly and efficiently and to ignore
the second act, the comment. This choice was made for two reasons: on the
one hand because the system believes that the answer “twenty minutes” will
satisfy the user (it is a short and thus satisfactory length of time), on the other
hand because it considers that confirming the belief, in this case true, is not
essential. Finally, in addition to the generation of an answer, the system
updated the dialogue history with a description of everything that we have
just seen and the materialization of the progress of the dialogue, especially the
fact that the system's answer continues to focus the dialogue only on the
itinerary which the user pointed at. Here we find certain aspects that we had
already discussed in Chapter 5.
To implement this type of process, we see that linguistic and pragmatic
analyses are essential, with, for example, the identification of indirect speech
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