{"type":"ScholarlyArticle","title":"The Representation and Use of Focus in a System for Understanding Dialogs","authors":[{"name":"Barbara J. Grosz","slug":"barbara-j-grosz","given":"Barbara J.","family":"Grosz","affiliation":""}],"abstract":"As a dialog progresses . the objects and actions that are most relevant to the conversation , and hence in the focus of attention of the dialog participants, change. This paper describes a representation of focus for language understanding systems , emphasizing its use in understanding taskoriented dialogs. The representation highlights that part of the knowledge base relevant at a given point in a dialog. A model of the task is used both to structure the focus representation and to provide an index into potentially relevant concepts in the knowledge base . The use of the focus representation to make retrieval of items from the knowledge base more efficient is described.","doi":null,"url":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1977/12","pdf":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1977/0012.pdf","markdown":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1977/12.md","bibtex":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1977/bibtex/12","volume":{"slug":"1977","title":"Proceedings of the Fifth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence","short_title":"IJCAI 1977","url":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1977/","year":1977,"location":"Cambridge, MA, USA","dates":"","editors":"Raj Reddy","isbn":"","publisher":"International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence","doi_prefix":""},"section":"Natural Language","track":"Natural Language","number":12,"pages":{"first":67,"last":75},"keywords":[],"videos":[],"references":[],"license_note":"Copyright International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence."}