Optimizing a discourse structuring component for utterance generation in human-computer dialogue

In this paper we describe a series of optimizations brought to a discourse structuring module for answer generation in dialogue systems. Starting from a baseline rhetorical structure updating algorithm, based on a first-order logic simulation of SDRT (ldquosegmented discourse representation theoryrdquo), several improved versions are obtained, applying a series of pragmatically-driven, psychologically-motivated or purely computational optimizations. These optimizations stem from a reduction in the complexity of the baseline algorithm, as well as from a better conformance of the rhetorical structures obtained to linguistic predictions.