Establishing Context in Task-Oriented Dialogs

Abstract

This paper describes part of the discourse component of a speech understanding system for task-oriented dialogs, specifically, a mechanism for establishing a focus of attention to aid in identifying the referents of definite noun phrases. In building a representation of the dialogue context, the discourse processor takes advantage of the fact that task oriented dialogues have a structure that closely parallels the structure of the task. The semantic network of the system is partitioned into focus Spaces with each focus space containing only those concepts pertinent to the dialogue relating to a sub task. The focus spaces are linked to their corresponding subtasks and ordered in a hierarchy determined by the relations among subtasks.