Scaling up from Dialogue to Multilogue: Some Principles and Benchmarks

Proceedings of the 43rd Annual Meeting of the ACL, pages 231–238, Ann Arbor, June 2005. c⃝2005 Association for Computational Linguistics Scaling up from Dialogue to Multilogue: some principles and benchmarks Jonathan Ginzburg and Raquel Fern´andez Dept of Computer Science King’s College, London The Strand, London WC2R 2LS UK {ginzburg,raquel}@dcs.kcl.ac.uk Abstract The paper considers how to scale up dialogue protocols to multilogue, settings with multiple conversationalists. We extract two benchmarks to evaluate scaled up protocols based on the long distance resolution possibilities of non- sentential utterances in dialogue and multi- logue in the British National Corpus. In light of these benchmarks, we then consider three possible transformations to dialogue protocols, formulated within an issue-based approach to dialogue management. We show that one such transformation yields protocols for querying and assertion that fulfill these benchmarks. 1 Introduction The development of dialogue systems in which a human agent interacts using natural language with a computa- tional system is by now a flourishing domain (see e.g. (NLE, 2003)), buttressed by an increasing theoretical and experimental literature on the properties of dialogue (see e.g. recent work in the SEMDIAL and SIGDIAL confer- ences). In contrast, the development of multilogue sys- tems, in which conversation with 3 or more participants ensue—is still in its early stages, as is the theoretical and experimental study of multilogue. The fundamental issue in tackling multilogue is: how can mechanisms motiv- ated for dialogue (e.g. information states, protocols, up- date rules etc) be scaled up to multilogue? In this paper we extract from a conversational cor- pus, the British National Corpus (BNC), several bench- marks that characterize dialogue and multilogue inter- action. These are based on the resolution possibilities of non-sentential utterances (NSUs). We then use these benchmarks to evaluate certain general transformations whose application to a dialogue interaction system yield a system appropriate for multilogue. There are of course various plausible views of the rela- tion between dialogue and multilogue. One possible ap- proach to take is to view multilogue as a sequence of dia- logues. Something like this approach seems to be adop- ted in the literature on communication between autonom- ous software agents. However, even though many situ- ations considered in multiagent systems do involve more than two agents, most interaction protocols are designed only for two participants at a time. This is the case of the protocol specifications provided by FIPA (Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents) for agent communication language messages (FIPA, 2003). The FIPA interaction protocols (IP) are most typically designed for two parti- cipants, an initiator and a responder . Some IPs permit the broadcasting of a message to a group of addressees, and the reception of multiple responses by the original initi- ator (see most particularly the Contract Net IP). However, even though more than two agents participate in the com- municative process, as (Dignum and Vreeswijk, 2003) point out, such conversations can not be considered mul- tilogue, but rather a number of parallel dialogues. The Mission Rehearsal Exercise (MRE) Project (Traum and Rickel, …

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