Abstract
People design what they say specifically for their conversational partners, and they adapt to their partners over the course of a conversation. A comparison of keyboard conversations involving a simulated computer partner (as in a natural language interface) with those involving a human partner (as in teleconferencing) yielded striking differences and some equally striking similarities. For instance, there were significantly fewer acknowledgments in human/computer dialogue than in human/human. However, regardless of the conversational partner, people expected connectedness across conversational turns. In addition, the style of a partner's response shaped what people subsequently typed. These results suggest some issues that need to be addressed before a natural language computer interface will be able to hold up its end of a conversation.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Bell, A.: 1984, ‘Language Style as Audience Design’. Language in Society 13, 145–204.
Bock, J. K.: 1986, ‘Syntactic Persistance in Language Production’. Cognitive Psychology 18(3), 355–387.
Brennan, S. E.: 1988, ‘The Multimedia Articulation of Answers in a Natural Language Database Query System’. In: Proc., Second Conference on Applied Natural Language Processing. Association of Computational Linguistics, Austin, TX, pp. 1–8.
Brennan, S. E.: 1990, ‘Conversation as Direct Manipulation: An Iconoclastic View’. In: B. Laurel (ed.), The Art of Human-Computer Interface Design. Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA.
Carbonell J. G.: 1979, ‘Towards a Self-Extending Parser’. In: Proc., 17th Annual Meeting of the ACL. Association of Computational Linguistics, pp. 3–7.
Carbonell, J. G. and P. J. Hayes: 1987, ‘Robust Parsing Using Multiple Construction Specific Strategies’ In: L. Bolc (ed.), Natural Language Parsing Systems. Springer-Verlag, New York.
Clark, H. H. and S. E. Brennan: 1991, ‘Grounding in Communication’. In: J. Levine L. B. Resnick, and S. D. Behrend (eds.), Shared Cognition: Thinking as Social Practice. APA Books, Washington D.C.
Clark, H. H. and G. L. Murphy: 1982, ‘Audience Design in Meaning and Reference’. In: J. F. LeNy and W. Kintsch (eds.), Language and Comprehension. North-Holland Publishing Company, Amsterdam.
Clark, H. H. and E. F. Schaefer: 1987, ‘Collaborating on Contributions to Conversations’. Language and Cognitive Processes 2, 1–23.
Clark, H. H. and E. F. Schaefer: 1989, ‘Contributing to Discourse’. Cognitive Science 13, 259–294.
Clark, H. H. and D. Wilkes-Gibbs: 1986, ‘Referring as a Collaborative Process’. Cognition 22, 1–39.
Garrod, S. and A. Anderson: 1987, ‘Saying What You Mean in Dialogue: A Study in Conceptual and Semantic Co-ordination’. Cognition 27, 181–218.
Guindon, R. K. Shuldberg, and J. Conner: 1987, ‘Grammatical and Ungrammatical Structures in User-Adviser Dialogues: Evidence for Sufficiency of Restricted Languages in Natural Language Interfaces to Advisory Systems’. In: Proc., 25th Annual Meeting of the ACL, Association of Computational Linguistics, Stanford, CA, pp. 41–44.
Hendrix, G.: 1985, Q&A. Software, Symantec.
Isaacs, E. and H. H. Clark: 1987, ‘Reference in Conversation Between Experts and Novices’. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 116, 26–37.
Laurel, B.: 1990, ‘Interface Agents: Metaphors With Character’. In: B. Laurel (ed.), The Art of Human-Computer Interface Design. Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA.
Levinson, S. C.: 1983, Pragmatics. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Levelt, W. J. M. and S. Kelter: 1982, ‘Surface Form and Memory in Question Answering’. Cognitive Psychology 14(1), 78–106.
Milroy, L.: 1987, ‘Style-Shifting and Code-Switching’. In: Observing and Analyzing Natural Language. Blackwell, New York, pp. 171–198.
Norman, D. A.: 1981, ‘The Trouble with Unix’. Datamation 27, 139–150.
Richards, M. A. and K. M. Underwood: 1984, ‘How Should People and Computers Speak to One Another?’. In: Proceedings, Interact '84: First IFIP Conference on ‘human-Computer Interaction’. London, International Federation for Information Processing, pp. 33–36.
Schneiderman, B.: 1981, ‘A Note on Human Factors Issues of Natural Language Interaction with Database Systems’. Information Systems 6(2), 125–129.
Schneiderman, B.: 1982, ‘The Future of Interactive Systems and the Emergence of Direct Manipulation’. Behavior and Information Technology 1, 237–256.
Schober, M. F. and H. H. Clark: 1989, ‘Understanding by Addressees and Overhearers’. Cognitive Psychology 21(2), 211–232.
Shatz, M. and R. Gelman: 1973, ‘The Development of Communication Skills: Modifications in the Speech of Young Children as a Function of Listener’. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development 38, 5:1–37.
Schegloff, E. and H. Sacks: 1973, ‘Opening Up Closings’. Semiotica 8, 289–327.
Sacks, H. E. Schegloff, and G. Jefferson: 1974, ‘A Simplest Systematics for the Organization of Turn-Taking in Conversation’. Language 50, 696–735.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Brennan, S.E. Conversation with and through computers. User Model User-Adap Inter 1, 67–86 (1991). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00158952
Received:
Revised:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00158952