Dialogue Management for Interactive Question Answering

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.