The Role of Knowledge and Certainty in Understanding for Dialogue

As people engage in increasingly complex conversations with computers, the need for generality and flexibility in spoken dialogue systems becomes more apparent. This pa­per describes how three different spoken dialogue systems for the same task reason with knowledge and certainty as they seek to understand what people want. It advocates sys­tems that exploit partial understanding, consider credibility, and are aware both of what they know and of their certainty that it matches their users’ intent.