A computing system is operable as virtual personal assistant (VPA) to understand relationships between different instances of natural language dialog expressed by different people in a multi-person conversational dialog session. The VPA can develop a common resource, a shared intent, which represents the VPA's semantic understanding of at least a portion of the multi-person dialog experience. The VPA can store and manipulate multiple shared intents, and can alternate between different shared intents as the multi-person conversation unfolds. With the shared intents, the computing system can generate useful action items and present the action items to one or more of the participants in the dialog session.