5. The method of claim 1 , wherein said dialogue interaction comprises one of recognizing speech, understanding a natural language, decoding speech, and parsing speech.
1. A method for managing dialogue interaction involving a computer, to allow a user to complete information for a composite data entity, said method operating on a hierarchical representation of a set of composite data entities and storing said hierarchical representation in a memory of the computer, the hierarchical representation comprising a plurality of levels, each level corresponding to a respective attribute of the composite data entities and each level comprising one or more nodes, each node comprising a value for the respective attribute such that each composite data entity is represented by a path through the hierarchical representation to a leaf node, the method comprising: with a processor of the computer, iteratively performing acts, comprising, for each iteration: with a component executing on the computer, generating one or more prompts to the user based on the hierarchical representation, the one or more prompts requesting user input that differentiates between two or more paths, each of the two or more paths being a path through the hierarchical representation to a leaf node of the plurality of leaf nodes in the hierarchical representation; recognizing in an utterance received from the user in response to the one or more prompts, one or more recognized values, each recognized value corresponding to a value of a node in the hierarchical representation; identifying a subset of the paths in said hierarchical representation, each path in the subset having a node with a value corresponding to each of the one or more recognized values; when the subset of paths ambiguously corresponds to a plurality of paths from a root node of the hierarchical representation to one or more of the leaf nodes: selecting a disambiguative portion of the hierarchical representation, the disambiguative portion comprising the subset of paths; and for a subsequent iteration, restricting generation, by the component, of the one or more prompts to the user, the component being restricted so as to generate the one or more prompts using the disambiguative portion of the hierarchical representation, wherein: the hierarchical representation comprises a tree; and the method further comprises determining whether the subset of paths ambiguously corresponds to a plurality of paths by determining whether a first set of nodes unambiguously corresponds to a single leaf node or ambiguously corresponds to a set of leaf nodes, the first set of nodes comprising each node in the hierarchical representation having a value corresponding to a value of the one or more recognized values.