Foundations of Collaborative Task-Oriented Dialogue: What's in a Slot?

In this paper, we examine the foundations of task-oriented dialogues, in which systems are requested to perform tasks for humans. We argue that the way this dialogue task has been framed has limited its applicability to processing simple requests with atomic "slot-fillers". However, such dialogues can contain more complex utterances. Furthermore, situations for which it would be desirable to build task-oriented dialogue systems, e.g., to engage in collaborative or multiparty dialogues, will require a more general approach. In order to provide such an approach, we give a logical analysis of the "intent+slot" dialogue setting that overcomes these limitations.