4: Accommodation and Reaccommodation in Dialogue

Abstract

This chapter examines how the notion of accommodation has been exploited in some simple-minded dialogue systems that we have constructed using the TRINDIKIT dialogue system toolkit. The notion of accommodation used here goes a little beyond normal notion of accommodation of presuppositions since it has largely to do with assumptions that dialogue participants have about what questions are under discussion. It looks at some real dialogue examples which can be analysed as question accommodation, i.e. the dialogue participant adds a question to QUD (Questions Under Discussion) which has not been explicitly raised. The chapter argues that there is a need for a local QUD and a global QUD representing questions that have been raised previously and that are available for re-raising. Finally, it shows how these considerations of real dialogue can feed back into implementation of dialogue systems and presents an implementation of a simplified version of re-accommodation and re-raising. Keywords: accommodation; dialogue participants; dialogue systems; Questions Under Discussion (QUD); TRINDIKIT dialogue system