Dialogue Management for Interactive Question Answering

May 2001

Proceedings of the Fourteenth International Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Society Conference (FLAIRS 2001)

Volume

Proceedings of the Fourteenth International Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Society Conference (FLAIRS 2001)

All Papers

With the increasing availability of on-line information, either on the Internet or within Intranets, the need for Question Answering (Q&A) systems that allow user interaction expressed in natural language has become critical. A major obstacle in building robust, user-friendly Q&A systems is the need to enable a conversation with the user in which clarifications, follow-up questions and context specification are made possible. This paper presents Interlocutor, a generic interactive shell that performs dialogue management for open-domain Q&A systems through a set of dialogue strategies enabled by task templates.