Others, including earlier versions of our system, bury discourse functions inside other modules, such as natural language interpretation or the back-end interface. An innovation of this work is the compartmentalization of discourse processing into three generically definable components--Dialogue Management, Context Tracking, and Pragmatic Adaptation (described in Section 1 below)--and the software control structure for interaction between these and other components of a spoken dialogue system (Section 2). In Section 3, we examine the dialogue processing requirement in a complex scenario involving multiple users and multiple simultaneous dialogues of diverse types. .
