This paper describes ongoing research on an adaptive conversational
agent supporting task-oriented dialogues.  The system will use spoken
input, and spoken and screen-based output, with the addition of other
modalities over time.  The issues addressed by this research include
adjusting dialogue management to suite an individual user's needs,
viewing dialogue as the interactive construction of database queries, and
effectively managing dialogues for such interfaces.  Two demonstration
tasks are being developed, one for destination recommendation,
specifically restaurants, and the other for finding information and
locations in a library setting.