A dialogue manager for a WWW-based information retrieval system

We present a collaborative dialogue framework for web information retrieval systems. The dialogue manager, whose main role is to help users in their documents searches, infers the user and system intentions, represents the interaction context and behaves as an intelligent interface between the user and the information retrieval system. The knowledge used by the dialogue manager in the inference and fulfilment of user and system intentions is mainly obtained trough the intelligent clustering of the documents in the database. The system also uses a knowledge base with some rules modelling domain knowledge on the documents subject (in our application, juridical knowledge). A detailed example in the law field is presented.