Conversational Adequacy: Mistakes are the Essence

We argue that meta-dialog and meta-reasoning, far from beingof only occasional use, are the very essence of conversation
and communication between agents. We give four paradigm examples
of massive use of meta-dialog where only limited base dialog
may be present, and use these to bolster our claim of centrality
for meta-dialog. We further illustrate this with related work
in active logics. We argue moreover that there may be a core
set of meta-dialog principles that is in some sense complete.
If we are right, then implementing such a set would be of
considerable interest. We give examples of existing computer
programs that converse inadequately according to our guidelines.
(Also cross-referenced as UMIACS-TR-96-41)