Dialogue Management for Automatic Troubleshooting and other Problem-solving Applications

This paper describes a dialogue management method suitable for automatic troubleshooting and other problem-solving applications.The method has a theoremproving flavor, in that it recursively decomposes tasks into sequences of sub-tasks and atomic actions.An explicit objective when designing the method was that it should be usable by other people than the designers themselves, notably IVR application developers.Therefore the method has a transparent execution model, and is configurable using a simple scripting language.