Conversation system with state information

Most current approaches to conversation system development invoke a complex set of language parsing rules or development tools difficult for novices to handle and are unable to convincingly simulate advanced natural language features such as topic awareness or conversation thread involvement. This study proposes an alternate approach based on the ripple down rules (RDR) algorithm, presently used to enable more effective maintenance of expert systems. This tree-based algorithm enables a conversation system to travel incrementally deeper into a particular topic, then to switch based on context-dependent information to the correct previously discussed topic � resulting in a highly reusable method of developing conversation systems based around a variety of topics.