Asking useful questions in information gathering dialogues

Abstract

Inquiry dialogues exist to gather data about a given topic. The dialogue systems of Black and Hunter (2009) generate such dialogues. Those dialogues are, however, large, due to the exhaustive strategy. The limited commitment, limited dialogue, smart dialogue and smart original strategy are proposed as modifications of that strategy to reduce the exhaustiveness of these dialogues. These strategies are investigated in three ways. By simulating dialogues, the practical effect of the modifications is investigated. By proving soundness and completeness, the correctness of the strategies is investigated. Lastly, the effect of the problem domain, an intake with the police, is briefly investigated. The smart dialogue and the two limited strategies generate significantly smaller dialectical trees, but are not sound or complete. Moreover, the generated dialogues were generally not smaller. The smart original strategy was found to be sound and complete, but only a marginal improvement. This thesis provides, furthermore, evidence that the effectiveness of a strategy highly depends on the knowledge base reasoned upon. It also demonstrates that building 'smart' strategies, that are also sound and complete, with no extra information is hard.