The Information State Approach to Dialogue Management

We introduce the information state approach to dialogue management, and show how it can be used to formalize theories of dialogue in a manner suitable for easy implementation. We also show how this approach can lead to better engineering of dialogue management components of dialogue systems, allowing for separate development of modular system fundamentals, dialogue theories, and domain-specific dialogue systems, in a manner where components can more easily be reused. TrindiKit is a tool instantiating the lowest level, and allowing straightforward implementation of dialogue theories formalized using the information state approach. We briefly describe several dialogue systems built using TrindiKit, and how components have been successfully further developed and reused in other projects.