Philippe Blache and Matthis Houlès, Laboratoire Parole et Langage, CNRS, Aix-en-Provence, France

This paper presents a dialogue system for training doctors to break bad news. The originality of this work lies in its knowledge representation. All information known before the dialogue (the universe of discourse, the context, the scenario of the dialogue) as well as the knowledge transferred from the doctor to the patient during the conversation is represented in a shared knowledge structure called common ground, that constitute the core of the system. The Natural Language Understanding and the Natural Language Generation modules of the system take advantage on this structure and we present in this paper different original techniques making it possible to implement them efficiently.

Dialogue systems, common ground, natural language understanding.