Goal Analysis: Plan Recognition in Dialogue Systems
Abstract
Plan recognition is an important aspect of dialogue processing, because it provides access to the speaker's intentions. Goal analysis is plan recognition that focuses on inferring the speaker's goals. This dissertation describes a goal analyzer called PAGAN. This dissertation makes four main contributions. First, it provides a theory of how the merits of an explanation of an utterance may be judged. There are three criteria for making such judgements: the applicability of the explanation to the system's needs; the grounding of the explanation in what is already known of the speaker and of the dialogue; and the completeness of the explanation's coverage of the speaker's goals. The second main contribution of this work is the introduction of a representation for plans and goals that solves two problems inherent in many approaches to plan representation. First, there is usually an inadequate distinction between the effects of an action and the effect that the action was intended to produce. Secondly, the traditional notion of a precondition fails to distinguish between heuristic planning knowledge and knowledge of the defining properties of actions. The third contribution of this work is a detailed analysis of ambiguity. This dissertation suggests a unified approach to handling these types of ambiguities. The fourth contribution of this work is the introduction of a method for determining how much processing of an utterance should be done. It is based on an assessment of the completeness of the explanation, and on an assessment of the practicability of continuing the processing.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Aug 01, 1989
- Accession Number
- ADA631686
Entities
People
- James Mayfield
Organizations
- University of California, Berkeley