Dialogue Management

Abstract

This report reviews the state of the art research in Dialogue Management (DM) Systems. Dialogue systems have been around since the 1960’s, the best known are conversation programs such as Eliza (Weizenbaum 1966) and Parry (Colby 1973). The approaches we describe are categorised as follows: finite state/dialogue grammars, plan-based and collaborative; however, this division is not perfect, since any system can in the end be implemented as a finite state system, but the distinction can correspond to design approaches versus implementation approaches, since finite state models can be used to implement a variety of approaches independently of the design choice. Again, collaborative models may or may not be plan-based, so this distinction too, is less than firm.