Dialogs

The basic idea for understanding dialogs is:


The dialog is given to us as 
  an ordered set of natural language sentenses
  We need some form of NLP to change these into 
  something more structured.  This project assumes 
  this is done by some other system.  We do define
  some possible outputs such a system might produce,
  We call these utterances.

A conversation is a sequence of urrerances
From each utterrance we determine one or more speech acts  
  A speech act is
    the hearers understanding (capta) of the intended meaning
    of the speakers utterance (data)
  different listeners may derive different speech acts 
    after hearing the same utterance
Then a listener updates its world model
  as a result of hearing the utterance