Graph-based representations of clarification strategies supporting automatic dialogue management

Abstract

This paper aims at presenting a dialogue-oriented approach to the construction of a graph knowledge base (KB) supporting task-oriented human-machine interactions. In particular, we focus on different pragmatic scenarios, facing the Common Ground issue and arguing that knowledge bases (in the form of graphs) are needed to make a clarification and recover pieces of information when inconsistencies occur during the communicative exchange.The main contributions of this work are: 1) a flexible dialog system architecture designed to be plugged into existing service infrastructures, 2) a graph-based knowledge representation protocol to manage both dialog domain and dialog management, 3) a detailed investigation of clarification requests forms with respect to their functions. After a brief introduction (see Section 1), we present: the theoretical underpinnings of the paper and the background work (see Section 2) our system architecture (see Sections 3 and 4) and the clarification requests (CRs) issue (see Section 5); our CRs classification, and some examples in context (see Section 6).