Tracking user goals in an information-seeking environment

This paper presents a model for hypothesizing and tracking the changing task-level goals of a speaker during the course of an information-seeking dialogue. It allows a complex set of domain-dependent plans, forming a hierarchial structure of component goals and actions. Our model builds the user's plan as the dialogue progresses, maintains both a local and a global plan context, and differentiates between past goals and goals currently pursued by the user. This research is part of a project to develop a robust natural language interface. If an utterance cannot be interpreted normally or a response cannot be generated due to pragmatic overshoot, the strong expectations about the utterance provided by our context model can be used as an aid in processing the input and producing useful responses.