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<Paper uid="P98-1096">
  <Title>Robust Interaction through Partial Interpretation and Dialogue Management</Title>
  <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Relying on a traditional deep and complete analysis of the utterances in a natural language interface requires much effort on building grammars and lexicons for each domain. Analyzing a whole utterance also gives problems with robustness, since the grammars need to cope with all possible variations of an utterance. In this paper we present results on developing knowledge-based natural language interfaces for information retrieval applications utilizing shallow and partial interpretation. Similar approaches are proposed in, for instance, the work on flexible parsing (Carbonell and Hayes, 1987) and in speech systems (cf. (Sj51ander and Gustafson, 1997; Bennacef et al., 1994)).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> The interpretation is driven by the information needed by the background system and guided by expectations from a dialogue manager.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> The analysis is done by parsing as small parts of the utterance as possible. The information needed by the interpretation module, i.e. grammar and lexicon, is derived from the database of the background system and information from dialogues collected in Wizard of &amp;quot; Authors are in alphabetical order Oz-experiments. We will present what types of information that are needed for the interpretation modules. We will also report on the sizes of the grammars and lexicon and results from applying the approach to information retrieval systems.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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