A research platform for multi-agent dialogue dynamics

Dialogue agents are often designed with the tacit assumption that at any time, there is only one agent and one human, and that their communication channel is exclusive. We are interested in evaluating complications that arise when multiple heterogeneous dialogue agents interact with one or more human interlocutors, and their communication channel is necessarily shared. In This work we describe a multi-agent dialogue test-bed that we have implemented to study such dialogue coordination issues. We also describe an initial pilot study that uses this test-bed to experiment with a very simple addressee disambiguation algorithm.