Making a contribution: Processing clarification requests in dialogue

Abstract:

Clarification Requests (CR) provide a useful window on how contributions to dialogue are processed. We present chat-tool experiments that introduce CRs mid-turn into ongoing dialogue. The pattern of responses shows people are sensitive to both constituent structure at the interruption point and apparent origin of the CR: the conversational partner or a ‘peripheral’ chat-bot participant. The results highlight the need for context-sensitive, sub-sentential but structured and incremental processing models.

Research areas:

• Dialogue
• Repair
• DiET chat tool
• Online text chat

Year:

2011

Type of Publication:

In Proceedings

Book title:

Proceedings of the 21st Annual Meeting of the Society for Text and Discourse

Address:

Poitiers, France

Month:

July