Abstract. Cognitive Dialogue Management is a novel approach to Dialogue Management which proposes a novel architecture for building up advanced interactive interfaces in natural language to computers, that are both flexible and robust. The architecture, based on dialogue, results from the integration of the Information State Dialogue Management model and the ViewFinder framework for the management of mental representations. This paper describes the principles of Cognitive Dialogue Management and provides hints about how metaphors of human information processing can be used both for improving the degree of communication understanding in human-computer interfaces, and for their rational design and development.