Tracing Actions Helps in Understanding Interactions

Integration of new utterances into context is a central task in any model for rational (human-machine) dialogues in natural language. In this paper, a pragmatics-first approach to specifying the meaning of utterances in terms of plans is presented. A rational dialogue is driven by the reaction of dialogue participants on how they find their expectations on changes in the environment satisfied by their observations of the outcome of performed actions. We present a computational model for this view on dialogues and illustrate it with examples from a real-world application.