Resolving Plan Ambiguity for Cooperative Response Generation

Abstract

Recognizing the plan underlying a query aids in the generation of an appropriate response. In this paper, we address the problem of how to generate cooperative responses when the user's plan is ambiguous. We show that it is not always necessary to resolve the ambiguity, and provide a procedure that estimates whether the ambiguity matters to the task of formulating a response. If the ambiguity does matter, we propose to resolve the ambiguity by entering into a clarification dialogue with the user and provide a procedure that performs this task. Together, these procedures allow a questionanswering system to take advantage of the interactive and collaborative nature of dialogue in recognizing plans and resolving ambiguity. 1 Introduction Somewhat obviously, plan recognition is the process of inferring an agent's plan from observation of the agent's actions. The agent's actions can be physical actions or speech actions. Four principal methods for plan recognition have been proposed in th...