Multi-agent human–machine dialogue: issues in dialogue management and referring expression semantics

This paper presents an implemented model of dialogue management for simple dialogues involving multiple speakers. In our model, the user is one speaker, and the system ‘plays’ a number of other speakers. We present a number of principles governing dialogue management in such cases, which relate to turn-taking and the identification of the addressees of utterances. We also consider how to extend a syntactic and semantic treatment of first- and second-person personal pronouns, and of addressee terms, in order to deal with the multi-speaker scenario. We give some examples of our current system, and conclude by outlining some extensions of the system to include disagreements, interruptions, and private communication between subgroups of dialogue participants.