Modeling and Analyzing Human-Computer Dialogues with Protocols

A new object-oriented model for modeling and analyzing human-computer dialogues is presented. In this model, dialogues are distributed over a number of objects all running in parallel, and each object maintains the state of a sub-dialogue. The dialogue model is based on only a few concepts: autonomous concurrent objects, communicating with each other via message passing, and the behavior of an object is recursively defined in terms of protocols. Protocols, a concept derived from the concurrent object-oriented language Procol, describe the interaction patterns with an object using an augmented regular expression notation. This dialogue model is targeted to concurrent multi-threaded event-driven dialogues. In addition, dialogues can be quite naturally visualized and interactively specified using graphical direct manipulation techniques.