Planning and logic programming for dialog management

Dialog interaction in conversational applications is subordinated to the goal of completing a domain-specific task. In this paper we present a basic architecture, a knowledge representation system, and a planning algorithm for dialogue management that decouples the interaction process from the planning task. In our system, the interaction is driven by the planner. We use logic programming, automatic planning and problem solving algorithms for representing information states and performing interaction management in the dialogue system. Our approach leverages recent advances in formalisms, inference engines, planning and problem solving, and is particularly suitable when implementing negotiation-intensive conversational applications.