Topics in SCHISMA dialogues

An important part of dialogue management in a dialogue system is topic management. The system has to keep track of topic aspects (current topic, context, obligations, …) in order to be able to resolve ambiguities and to respond in a cooperative and sensible way. In the Schisma project, we are developing a system that takes part in a conversation about theatre performances and which is able to make reservations for these performances. In this paper we discuss several techniques for topic management that we developed and tested .