A Few Dialogue Strategies - Man-Machine Dialogue: Design and Challenges - page 143

true: “no, it is not the shortest. Here is the shortest itinerary”, highlighting the
matching itinerary on the screen.
- No matter the importance given to a comment being true or false, the
system may consider that from a linguistic point of view it must first answer
the first act and then the second act, which gives “two hours, but it is
not the shortest itinerary” or, with a cooperating behavior, which is greatly
appreciated, “two hours, but the shortest itinerary is this one”.
Many other answers are possible, and this illustration shows on the one
hand that generating answers in natural language to increase the MMD's
realism creates many issues, and on the other hand that a fine identification of
semantic content, speech acts and the hearers' mental states is required for the
system to achieve an adequate behavior, i.e. behavior that is comprehensive,
relevant, coherent and adapted to the task being solved.
8.3. Conclusion
The task to be accomplished is the driving force behind the dialogue: the
dialogue progresses when the task progresses. However, a realistic
man-machine dialogue should not be built around this priority alone: it also
has to take into account fluidity and the linguistic spontaneity of exchanges.
This chapter confronts behavior versus the task and the linguistic behavior, to
show how to get closer to a natural dialogue in natural language. Dialogue
strategy examples illustrate not only how a system can be optimized in that
direction but also how a system can be made to lie.