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arXiv · 2007.04428

Discourse Coherence, Reference Grounding and Goal Oriented Dialogue

Baber Khalid·Malihe Alikhani·Michael Fellner·Brian McMahan·Matthew Stone
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Abstract

Prior approaches to realizing mixed-initiative human--computer referential communication have adopted information-state or collaborative problem-solving approaches. In this paper, we argue for a new approach, inspired by coherence-based models of discourse such as SDRT \cite{asher-lascarides:2003a}, in which utterances attach to an evolving discourse structure and the associated knowledge graph of speaker commitments serves as an interface to real-world reasoning and conversational strategy. As first steps towards implementing the approach, we describe a simple dialogue system in a referential communication domain that accumulates constraints across discourse, interprets them using a learned probabilistic model, and plans clarification using reinforcement learning.

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Baber Khalid, Malihe Alikhani, Michael Fellner, Brian McMahan, Matthew Stone. 2020-07-08. Discourse Coherence, Reference Grounding and Goal Oriented Dialogue. https://arxiv.org/abs/2007.04428

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