Relating dialogue games to information state

Abstract

This paper discusses the use of `conversational' or `dialogue games' as a basis for building dialogue systems. We give a tutorial overview of some recent attempts to relate the notion of a dialogue act to changes of information state of the participants in a dialogue. These attempts all distinguish some notion of `grounded' or `common' propositions. We raise the question as to whether these attempts might make the notion of dialogue game redundant, reducing it to an epiphenomenon arising out of the manipulation of information states. The answer to the question is no, not quite, yet. We also look briefly at a suggestion for augmenting the notion of information state so as to be able to deal with some types of prosodically marked focus.