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Methods that are more sophisticated.
As we've just seen, using finite state techniques in dialogue processing may lead to good results with relatively little effort, but only under certain conditions. If for instance great flexibility in a complicated domains is what is needed, finite state techniques often don't lead to satisfying solutions.
In such cases, one uses methods that are more sophisticated linguistically as well as technically. Such methods often involve a fair amount of reasoning, for instance about plans and communicative intentions. A key idea is that of representing the user's and the system's knowledge state explicitely and employ reasoning techniques on these state representations. Fully-fledged reasoning also allows for the consideration of domain knowldege to the extent needed for solving even quite complex tasks. Another concept of great importance in designing advanced dialogue systems is that of speech acts (or dialogue acts), defining what role a each utterance plays within a dialogue.
Two examples of quite ambitious dialogue systems are the TRAINS system (we have seen in Section 1.3) and its successor, the TRIPS system which we will present in Section 3.4.
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