CONVERSATIONAL ADEQUACY - MISTAKES ARE THE ESSENCE

We argue that meta-dialog and meta-reasoning, far from being of only o ccasional 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 object dialog may be present, and use these to bolster our claim of centrality for meta-dialog. We further illustr ate this with related work in active logics. We argue moreover that th ere may be a core set of meta-dialog principles that is in some sense complete, and that may correspond to the human ability to engage in '' free-ranging'' conversation. If we are right, then implementing such a set would be of considerable interest. We give examples of existing c omputer programs that converse inadequately according to our guideline s. (C) 1998 Academic Press Limited.