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Recent progress in the field of spoken natural language understanding expanded the scope of spoken language systems to include mixed initiative dialogue. Currently there are no agreed upon theoretical foundations for the design of such systems. In this work we propose a stochastic model of computer-human interactions. This model can be used for learning and adaptation of the dialogue strategy and for objective evaluation. 1. INTRODUCTION Man-machine interactions, from simple touch tone menus to more complex speech based systems are ubiquitous in todays world. In the natural language and AI research communities there are even more complex examples of dialogue systems that make use of natural ways of communication like speech and language 1, 2, 3, 6. In this paper we show that such dialogue systems can be formally described in terms of their state space, action set and strategy. The state of a dialogue system represents all the knowledge the system has at a certain time about interna...
Levin et al. (Mon,) studied this question.