In most of dialogues, speakers usually make a dialogue to pursue some goals. In this case, the order of the utterances in the dialogue follows the structure of a plan to satisfy the goals. Therefore, to understand a dialogue, a computer must use the knowledge about various plans speakers might use.
This thesis describes a method for understanding dialogue using dialogue plans in hotel reservation. Domain and discourse plans are used for inferring the speaker's goals and intention. Domain plans model the actions and states in the domain of conversations and discourse plans represent the knowledge about the discourse of dialogues.
This system concentrates on inferencing the speaker's intentions. The system uses script framework for domain plan, because script framework is more efficient and effective than plan framework in restricted domain such as hotel reservation. A prototype system was implemented in Prolog language on the UNIX system.
