A lot to answer for: Interactivity and responses to clarification requests

Abstract:

Turn construction in dialogue is a fundamentally incremental and interactive process and the coordination of common ground is crucial to understanding. This talk will discuss some experiments that systematically introduce spoof clarification requests (CRs) into an ongoing text dialogue. These CRs target a noun phrase (NP) that has either previously been talked about in the current dialogue (given information) or not (new information) and appear to come from either the other person in the conversation or an external source. Results show that the response depends on whether the target of the CR should be in the common ground or not, which is affected both by whether the targeted NP is given or new and whether the apparent source has been involved in the joint action of building common ground. A formal model of dialogue needs to take into account not just what is said and how, but also who is actively involved in the process of doing so.

Research areas:

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

Year:

2016

Type of Publication:

In Proceedings

Book title:

The third International Conference on Language, Interactivity and Cognition: The Tactility of Thinking and Talking

Address:

London, UK