-Human discourse appears coherent when it re- fleets coherent human thought. However, computers do not necessarily store or process information in the same way that people do a.ud~ therefore, cannot rely on the structure of their reuouing for the structure of thehr dialogue,s. In- stead, computer-generated conversation must rely on some other mechanism for its orgsaiisation. In this paper, we discuss one such mechanism. We describe a template that provides a guide for conversation. The template is built from schemata representing discourse convention. As goals arrive from the problem solver they are added to the tem- plate. Because accepted discourse structures are used to connect a new goal to the existing template, goals are or- ganiaed into sub-groups that follow conventional, coherent ...

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