Planning for Problem Formulation in Advice-Giving Dialogue

PLANNING FOR PROBLEM FORMULATION IN ADVICE-GIVING DIALOGUE Paul Decitre, Thomas Grossi, C14o Jullien, Jean-Philippe Solvay Cap Sogeti Innovation Centre de Recherche de Grenoble Chemin du Vieux Chine 38240 Meylan, France Abstract We distinguish three main, overlapping activities in an advice-giving dialogue: problem formulation, resolution, and explanation. This paper focuses on a problem for- mulation activity in a dialogue module which interacts on one side with an expert problem solver for financial investing and on the other side with a natural language front-end. Several strategies which reflect specific aspects of person-machine advice-giving dialogues are realized by incorporating planning at a high-level of dialogue. Introduction As performances and scope of intelligent systems in- crease and the interaction of a system with a user gains in complexity, it becomes desirable to provide an easy initial access to a system for the novice user. Natural language is a medium presumably known by most users. For the system however, it not only requires understanding nat- ural language "utterances" (on a keyboard) but also rec- ogni~.ing the intentions behind these utterances. It leads to a full-fledged dialogue involving much reasoning at the pragmatic level of the communication process. The com- petence of most intelligent systems is usually bound to a restricted application domain and we can imagine that part of a dialogue is domain-dependent while another is domain-independent. Our efforts aim at designing a dia- logue module making these different aspects explicit and interacting with other knowledge-based agents. This work contributes to Esprit Project 816 EsteamX: An architec- ture for distributed problem solving by cooperating data and knowledge bases. Advice-giving systems for financial investment have been chosen as a first testbed application. This paper describes preliminary research on the dialogue module of such a system and the resulting prototype. An advice-giving dialogue comprises three main activ- ities, which may overlap: - l~wblsm form,dug/on, where the various needs and ca- pabilities of the user are elicited; - reso/uh'on, in which a possible solution to the problem is determined; - ezpla~;tion, which aims at convincing the user that IThe project is supported in part by the Commission of the European Communities the solution is in fact what she/he needs. Our work concentrates on a problem formulation activity in a dialogue module which cooperates with a problem solver and a natural language front-end. The problem solver selects adequate securities for basic investment sit- uations of a private investor and is being developed as part of the same Esprit project [Bruffaerts 1986]. The natural language front-end based on functional grammars is the result of separate research at Cap Sogeti Innovation [Fimbel 1985, Lancel 1986]. Computational Aspects Dialogue and communication theory are a broad field of studies drawing on several disciplines, among them phi- losophy, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence. The flurry of research devoted to these topics in recent years is largely enough to convince us we could not seriously hope to tackle the "general" problem. We have therefore limited our interest to person-machine advice-giving dia- logue and we focus …

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