Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We describe an empirically based approach to the computational management of dialogues. It is based on an explicit theoretically motivated position regarding the status of computational models, where it is claimed that computational models of discourse can only be about computers' processing of language. The dialogue model is based on an extensive analysis of collected dialogues from various application domains. Issues concerning computational tractability has also been decisive for its development. It is concluded that a simple dialogue grammar based model is sufficient for the management of dialogues with natural language interfaces. W e also describe the grammar used by the dialogue manager for a Natural Language interface for a database system.