A theory of dialogue structures to help manage human-computer interaction

The authors hypothesize the human-computer interaction can be significantly improved by using human-human communication protocols at the interface. These human communication principles are presented for a system built as a natural-language interface to an airline information and reservation system called simulated airline reservation agent (SARA). In particular, they present an extension to human communication theory that makes it possible to create a natural-language interface using human communication principles. Particular attention is given to the use of metacommunication to help manage the shared communication context. The current implementation can parse and generate >5000 surface versions of a single underlying request content, which can help the interface infer some of the user's goals and intentions. It is concluded that this technology can be used as a front end for any task domain, yielding much of the full expressiveness of English.<
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