Re: What are the first few things you ask someone ?

"Jean-Baptiste Hétier" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message news:<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>...
> I'm making a programe which is supposed to talk with you as in a chat or
> something like. I've written the algorithm, but it now needs a brain.
> 
> Could you tell me the few first questions you would ask someone you meet.
> Thanks !

well, for someone to open a conversation, they must have an intention
that cannot be reasonably be fulfilled by their own action, and can
possibly be fulfilled by the other agent. So you have to look at what
the agent intends, and then how he makes a dialogue plan that fulfills
the intention. Of course with no information, the intention could be
almost anything. So to avoid an ai-complete situation, you need to put
the agents in one of those situations where there aren't that many
intentions - at the travel agent shop, or in the bank. There are lots
of corpora available of humans making dialogue in these situations
which might be useful to give you statistics over intentions and
plans. As for social settings where there is no definite intention,
things may be a bit harder, but then again, people tend to go for
lowest common denominator intention recognition such as knowing what
someone does for a job etc - all the large-grained facts that might
foster future cooperative interactions. i'm not sure of corpora that
cover these settings, but i think the switchboard corpus is more
domain-free, more "conversational" than others. if what you're asking
for is the distribution of openings, working with a corpus might be
useful