This book summarizes the main problems posed by the design of a man machine dialogue system and offers ideas on how to continue along the path towards efficient, realistic and fluid communication between humans and machines. A culmination of ten years of research, it is based on the author s development, investigation and experimentation covering a multitude of fields, including artificial intelligence, automated language processing, man machine interfaces and notably multimodal or multimedia interfaces. Contents Part 1. Historical and Methodological Landmarks 1. An Assessment of the Evolution of Research and Systems. 2. Man Machine Dialogue Fields. 3. The Development Stages of a Dialogue System. 4. Reusable System Architectures. Part 2. Inputs Processing 5. Semantic Analyses and Representations. 6. Reference Resolution. 7. Dialogue Acts Recognition. Part 3. System Behavior and Evaluation 8. A Few Dialogue Strategies. 9. Multimodal Output Management. 10. Multimodal Dialogue System Assessment. About the Authors Fr d ric Landragin is a computer science engineer and has a PhD from the University of Lorraine, France. He is currently in charge of linguistics research for the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). His studies focus on the analysis and modeling of language interpretation. Man machine dialogue is one of the applications of this research.