---
title: "The Representation and Use of Focus in a System for Understanding Dialogs"
authors:
  - "Barbara J. Grosz"
doi: ""
url: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1977/12"
pdf: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1977/0012.pdf"
venue: "Proceedings of the Fifth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence"
year: 1977
pages: "67-75"
track: "Natural Language"
keywords:
---

# The Representation and Use of Focus in a System for Understanding Dialogs

Barbara J. Grosz

*Proceedings of the Fifth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence*, pages 67-75.

## 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.