Technical reports

Belief revision and dialogue management in information retrieval

Brian Logan, Steven Reece, Alison Cawsey, Julia Galliers, Karen Spärck Jones

May 1994, 227 pages

DOI: 10.48456/tr-339

Abstract

This report describes research to evaluate a theory of belief revision proposed by Galliers in the context of information-seeking interaction as modelled by Belkin, Brooks and Daniels and illustrated by user-librarian dialogues. The work covered the detailed assessment and development, and computational implementation and testing, of both the belief revision theory and the information retrieval model. Some features of the belief theory presented problems, and the original ‘multiple expert’ retrieval model had to be drastically modified to support rational dialogue management. But the experimental results showed that the characteristics of literature seeking interaction could be successfully captured by the belief theory, exploiting important elements of the retrieval model. Thus, though the system’s knowledge and dialogue performance were very limited, it provides a useful base for further research. The report presents all aspects of the research in detail, with particular emphasis on the implementation of belief and intention revision, and the integration of revision with domain reasoning and dialogue interaction.

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BibTeX record

@TechReport{UCAM-CL-TR-339,
  author =	 {Logan, Brian and Reece, Steven and Cawsey, Alison and
          	  Galliers, Julia and Sp{\"a}rck Jones, Karen},
  title = 	 {{Belief revision and dialogue management in information
         	   retrieval}},
  year = 	 1994,
  month = 	 may,
  url = 	 {https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/techreports/UCAM-CL-TR-339.pdf},
  institution =  {University of Cambridge, Computer Laboratory},
  doi = 	 {10.48456/tr-339},
  number = 	 {UCAM-CL-TR-339}
}