@techreport{R-91-03, TITLE = {A Dialogue Manager Using Initiative-Response Units and Distributed Control}, AUTHOR = {Arne J{\"o}nsson}, YEAR = {1991}, NUMBER = {R-91-03}, INSTITUTION = ida, ADDRESS = idaaddr, ABSTRACTURL = {/publications/cgi-bin/tr-fetch.pl?r-91-03+abstr}, ABSTRACT = {This paper describes a system for managing dialogue in a natural language interface. The proposed approach uses a dialogue manager as the overall control mechanism. The dialogue manager accesses domain independent resources for interpretation, generation and back-ground system access. It also uses information from domain dependent knowledge sources, which are customized for various applications. Instead of using complex plan-based reasoning, the dialogue manager uses information about possible interaction structures and information from the specific dialogue situation to manage the dialogue. This is motivated from the analysis of a series of experiments where users interacted with a simulated natural language interface. The dialogue manager integrates information about segment types and moves into a hierarchical dialogue tree. The dialogue tree is accessed through a scoreboard which uses exchangeable access functions. The control is distributed and the dialogue is directed from action plans in the nodes in the dialogue tree}, IDANR = {LiTH-IDA-R-91-03}, NOTE = {Also presented at the 5th Conference of the European Chapter of the ACL, Berlin, Germany, April 9-11, 1991}