An architecture for dialogue management: Implications in user-computer dialogue design

The management of user-computer dialogues involves the examination of policies, procedures and methodologies that enable users and designers to control, monitor and facilitate effective user-computer communication. Dialogue management can be facilitated by the application of software tools in the dialogue design phases. The tools and methods serve to exploit pertinent environmental attributes and result in the determination of alternative dialogue components and relations. This paper defines an architecture for dialogue management that supports conceptualization, transformation, generation and realization in dialogue design. The architecture promotes functional layering, modularization and invocability of dialogue functions by application systems.