Focused interaction in dialogues

This report addresses the dialogue support issues involved in tailoring courses to organization‐specific requirements. We present a brief discussion of current dialogue support techniques and discuss their inability to facilitate focussed interfacing, a crucial element in raising the quality of service available to real‐world organizations. In any real‐world organization the functionality must exist to modify and refine an initial position with respect to a course. We demonstrate techniques for focusing on the task at hand and incorporating partial decision elements in the dialogue interface itself, providing an illustration of our approach.