Toward spoken dialogue as mutual agreement

This paper re-envisions human-machine dialogue as a set of mutual agreements between a person and a computer. The intention is to provide the person with a habitable experience that accomplishes her goals, and to provide the computer with sufficient flexibility and intuition to support them. The application domain is particularly challenging: for its vocabulary size, for the number and variety of its speakers, and for the complexity and number of the possible instantiations of the objects under discussion. The brittle performance of a traditional spoken dialogue system in such a domain motivates the design of a new, more robust social system, one where dialogue is necessarily represented on a variety of different levels.