A Few Dialogue Strategies - Man-Machine Dialogue: Design and Challenges - page 140

and some issues require a clarification request. However, the opposite is also
unacceptable: a system systematically relying on the user to solve its
interpretation problems ends up being annoying. This is the case, for
example, of some of the first systems with online machine learning, which in
order to check they had integrated a new term properly or to see they had
understood correctly, asked a closed question at almost every speaking turn.
Multimodal dialogue management and, for example, dialogue management
for an information system, that is a system devoted to presenting complex
information such as geographical data, have many other aspects specific to the
management of this amount of information. If the system decides to present
the details of 30 train itineraries, or to show a geographic map annotated with
the elements answering the user's query, it must be able to control the way
in which it transmits this information. This can be done by planning, that is
allocating the transmission over several speaking turns. This can also happen
by allocating the information over various communication possibilities, a bit
like “here are the possible itineraries”, but mostly as we will see in Chapter 9.
On this criterion of information quantity close to the notion of cognitive load,
[HOR07]presentsandmodelsthreedialoguestrategiesfollowingaquerysuch
as “I would like to go to Paris”:
- Enumeration: in the case in which the number of solutions is reasonable
(but then a threshold has to be decided upon, especially since this threshold
depends on the average amount of information contained in a solution), the
system presents a list covering all the solutions, and this list can be verbalized,
displayed, or partially verbalized and partially displayed.
- Restriction: in the case in which the number of solutions goes beyond
the reasonable threshold, the system suggests criteria to limit the scope of the
research space. The system can also suggest conditional answers. More than
the transmission of an answer, the dialogue act here is the transmission of
conditions to solve a problem.
- Relaxation: in the case in which there is no solution found, the
system suggests either alternative solutions or alternative research criteria. The
potentially displayed answers are suggestions rather than answers.
In a multimodal context, dialogue management also has the temporal
management of speaking turns, especially when research and, even more, the
presentation of complex information take time. We have seen that it was not