Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The goals of the speakers are the motivating force behind a conversation. The differences in these goals, and their relative priorities, account for many of the differences between conversations. In order to be easily understood, however, the resulting conversation must be constrained by the language conventions shared by speaker and hearer. In this paper we describe how the use of schemas for conversational control can be made flexible by integrating the priorities of a system's goals into the process of selecting the next utterance. Our ideas are implemented in a system called JUDIS (Turner & Cullingford, 1989), a natural language interface for an advice-giving system.