  In expert-consultation dialogues, it is inevitable that an agent will at
times have insufficient information to determine whether to accept or reject a
proposal by the other agent. This results in the need for the agent to initiate
an information-sharing subdialogue to form a set of shared beliefs within which
the agents can effectively re-evaluate the proposal. This paper presents a
computational strategy for initiating such information-sharing subdialogues to
resolve the system's uncertainty regarding the acceptance of a user proposal.
Our model determines when information-sharing should be pursued, selects a
focus of information-sharing among multiple uncertain beliefs, chooses the most
effective information-sharing strategy, and utilizes the newly obtained
information to re-evaluate the user proposal. Furthermore, our model is capable
of handling embedded information-sharing subdialogues.
