The current invention provides a method for managing a dialogue between a processing system and a user. It addresses the problem of inferring possible feature values by automatically generating an SQL query from a frame representation posting this query to a relational database containing the relevant domain knowledge, and updating the frame representation to reflect the results of this query. Because the method is not dependent on particular information of the domain utilizing the method, it can be readily implemented for any specific application which benefits from inferring possible feature values by extracting data from a database.