| Summary: | The management of man-computer dialogues involves policies, procedures, and methodologies that enable users and designers to control, monitor, and enhance the user-computer interface. Effective dialogue management can be facilitated by a computer-aided work-bench of dialogue management tools that integrate pertinent environmental attributes into executable dialogue forms. Consequently, a methodology for generating dialogue designs is required. This research presents a framework for modeling user-computer interactions, or dialogues. The approach taken herein focuses on analysis of task, user, and information technology attributes. This analytical framework isolates dialogue entities and entity groupings. Together, these entities and their groupings suggest a language for information presentation and elicitation in the user-computer dialogue process. As a result, alternative dialogue models can be specified independent of hardware and software technologies. Furthermore, these models can be evaluated to ensure completeness, consistency, and integrity. Under this framework, various dialogue management functions can be integrated into a generalized dialogue management environment. Such an environment facilitates the transformation of task, user, and information technology attributes into executable dialogue definitions. The architecture of this environment is characterized by functionally layered and modularized software tools for dialogue management. The implementation of the proposed methodologies and the dialogue management architecture results in a set of dialogue management design facilities. These facilities foster effective management of dialogues within organizations and lead to a better understanding of the dialogue process.
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