Relating dialogue games to information state

This paper1 discusses the use of `conversational' or `dialogue games' as a basis for building dialogue systems. We give a tutorial overview of some recent attempts to relate the notion of a dialogue act to changes of information state of the participants in a dialogue. These attempts all distinguish some notion of `grounded' or `common' propositions. We raise the question as to whether these attempts might make the notion of dialogue game redundant, reducing it to an epiphenomenon arising out of the manipulation of information states. The answer to the question is no, not quite, yet. We also look briefly at a suggestion for augmenting the notion of information state so as to be able to deal with some types of prosodically marked focus. 1 DIALOGUE GAMES The use of dialogue games and moves as a level of linguistic description in characterising what is happening in a dialogue has become ubiquitous, at least in computational approaches. A somewhat coarse-grained charac...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2002
• Where: SPEECH
• Authors: Stephen G. Pulman
• Keywords: Dialogue Games, Dialogues, Information State, SPEECH 2002