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<Paper uid="P99-1025">
  <Title>Construct Algebra: Analytical Dialog Management</Title>
  <Section position="4" start_page="191" end_page="191" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
2 Task Representation
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Information about the task is defined using an object inheritance hierarchy. The inheritance hierarchy defines the relationships that exist amongst the task knowledge. Objects are defined to encode the hierarchy.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> This representation adheres to the principles of object-oriented design as described in (Booch, 1994). Each of the objects has three partitions. The first partition contains the name of the object, the second contains a list of variables with associated values that are specific to the object, and the third partition contains any methods associated with the object. For simplicity of illustration we will not include any of the methods. Each of the objects inherits its methods from a higher level object called the Construct. The Construct's methods are the relations and operations that will be described in section 4.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> The result of the speech recognizer is sent to the spoken language understanding (SLU) module. The SLU module extracts the meaning of the user's utterance and produces a list of possible objects with associated confidence scores that is interpreted by the dialog manager. The dialog manager then uses the inheritance hierarchy and an algorithm 1 fully described in (Abella and Gorin, 1997) to produce a set of semantically consistent inputs to be used by the dialog manager. The input is represented as a boolean expression of constructs extracted from the utterance. This input is then manipulated by the dialog motivators to produce an appropriate action, which most often consists of playing a prompt to the user or generating a query to a database.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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