Generating Information-Sharing Subdialogues in Expert-User Consultation

Abstract

In expert-consultation dialogues, it is inevitable that an agent will at times have insufficient information to determine whether to accept or reject a proposal by the other agent This results in the need tor the agent to initiate an information-sharing subdialogue to form a set of shared beliefs within which the agents can effectively re-evaluate the proposal This paper presents a computational strategy for initiating such information-sharing subdialogues to resolve the systems uncertainty regarding the acceptance of a user proposal Our model determines when information sharing should be pursued selects a focus of information-sharing among multiple uncertain beliefs chooses the most effective information-sharing strategy and utilizes the newly obtained information to re-evaluate the user proposal Furthermore our model is capable of handling embedded informauon sharing subdialogues.