Dialogue-Games: Meta-Communication Structures for Natural Language Interaction
Abstract
Studies of naturally occurring human dialogue have led to the recognition of a new class of regularities which characterize important aspects of communication. People appear to interact regularly according to established patterns which span several turns in a dialogue and which recur frequently. These patterns appear to be organized around the goals which the dialogue serves for each participant. Many things which are said later in a dialogue can only be interpreted as pursuit of goals established earlier in the dialogue by goal- setting parts of these patterns. These patterns have been represented by a set of knowledge structures called Dialogue-games, capturing shared conventional knowledge that people have about communication and how it can be used to achieve goals. A Dialogue-game has Parameters, which represent those elements that vary across instances of a particular pattern. The Parameters identify the particular dialogue participants and the content topic. The states of the world which must be in effect for a particular Dialogue-game to be employed successfully are represented by specifications of these Parameters. Finally, the expected sequence of intermediate states that occur during instances of a particular conventional pattern are represented by the Components of the Dialogue-game. This report describes a representation for several Dialogue-games, based on our analyses of different kinds of naturally occurring dialogue. A process model is described, showing Dialogue-game identification, pursuit, and termination as part of the comprehension of dialogue utterances. This Dialogue-game Model captures some of the important functional aspects of language, especially indirect uses to achieve implicit communication.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Jan 01, 1977
- Accession Number
- ADA037110
Entities
People
- James A. Levin
- James A. Moore
Organizations
- University of Southern California