Dialogue Management With Linear Logic: The Role Of Metavariables In Questions And Clarifications

In this paper, we study the formalisation of a dialogue management system using proof-search on top of a linear logic. We argue that linear logic is the natural formalism to implement information-state dialogue management. We give particular attention to modelling question-answering sequences, including clarification requests, and argue that metavariables, arising from unification in the proof search, play a decisive role in providing a natural formalisation. We show that our framework is not only well suited from a theoretical perspective, but it is also suitable for implementation which we exemplify with a small scale implementation.