Towards Negotiative Dialogue for the Talkamatic Dialogue Manager
Staffan Larsson, Alexander Berman, David Hjelm
TL;DR
This paper addresses extending a dialogue manager with negotiative dialogue capabilities to support user-driven exploration and refinement of information. It presents Tala phase 1 and the Tala SDK for creating Dialogue Domain Descriptions (DDDs), enabling developers to add negotiative features to the Talkamatic Dialogue Manager without modifying its core engine. The authors implement three key features—asking about alternatives, knowledge precondition questions (KPQs), and modifying search criteria—demonstrating how general dialogue solutions can be reused within a specific domain (telephone directory) via XML-described DDDs. The work highlights a scalable approach to expanding conversational AI capabilities beyond form-based interaction while maintaining domain separation and reusability, with future work to complete phase 2 and tool integration.
Abstract
The paper describes a number of dialogue phenomena associated with negotiative dialogue, as implemented in a development version of the Talkamatic Dialogue Manager (TDM). This implementation is an initial step towards full coverage of general features of negotiative dialogue in TDM.