@inproceedings{cohen-2019-foundations,
    title = "Foundations of Collaborative Task-Oriented Dialogue: What{'}s in a Slot?",
    author = "Cohen, Philip",
    editor = "Nakamura, Satoshi  and
      Gasic, Milica  and
      Zukerman, Ingrid  and
      Skantze, Gabriel  and
      Nakano, Mikio  and
      Papangelis, Alexandros  and
      Ultes, Stefan  and
      Yoshino, Koichiro",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 20th Annual SIGdial Meeting on Discourse and Dialogue",
    month = sep,
    year = "2019",
    address = "Stockholm, Sweden",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/iwcs-25-ingestion/W19-5924/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/W19-5924",
    pages = "198--209",
    abstract = "In this paper, we examine the foundations of task-oriented dialogues, in which systems are requested to perform tasks for humans. We argue that the way this dialogue task has been framed has limited its applicability to processing simple requests with atomic ``slot-fillers''. However, real task-oriented dialogues can contain more complex utterances that provide non-atomic constraints on slot values. For example, in response to the system{'}s question ``What time do you want me to reserve the restaurant?'', a user should be able to say ``the earliest time available,'' which cannot be handled by classic ``intent + slots'' approaches that do not incorporate expressive logical form meaning representations. Furthermore, situations for which it would be desirable to build task-oriented dialogue systems, e.g., to engage in mixed-initiative, collaborative or multiparty dialogues, will require a more general approach. In order to overcome these limitations and to provide such an approach, we give a logical analysis of the ``intent+slot'' dialogue setting using a modal logic of intention and including a more expansive notion of ``dialogue state''. Finally, we briefly discuss our program of research to build a next generation of plan-based dialogue systems that goes beyond ``intent + slots''."
}