There is growing agreement that dialogue management is critical to speech enabled applications. This paper describes a novel approach to knowledge acquisition in the natural language processing domain, and shows the use of techniques from cognitive task analysis to capture politeness protocols from a “dialogue expert.” Acknowledging the importance of intentions in mixed initiative systems, our aim was to use an off-the-shelf Belief, Desire, and Intention (BDI) framework from Agent Oriented Software to provide the planning component, and introduce plan library cards as a means of capturing expertise in this context.