language: en

Towards a Principled Representation of Discourse Plans

R. Michael Young Johanna D. Moore Martha E. Pollack
ISP Technical Report 94-2 May 1994

Abstract We argue that discourse plans must capture the intended causal and decompositional relations between communicative actions. We present a planning algorithm, DPOCL, that builds plan structures that properly capture these relations, and show how these structures are used to solve the problems that plagued previous discourse planners, and allow a system to participate effectively and flexibly in an ongoing dialogue. A version of this paper appears in the Proceedings of the Sixteenth Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, Atlanta, GA, 1994.