Abstract

The paper presents principles of dialogue co-operativity derived from a corpus of task-oriented spoken human-machine dialogue. The corpus was recorded during the design of a dialogue model for a spoken language dialogue system. Analysis of the corpus produced a set of dialogue design principles intended to prevent users from having to initiate clarification and repair meta-communication which the system would not understand. Developed independently of Grice's work on co-operation in spoken dialogue, these principles provide an empirical test of the correctness and completeness of Grice's maxims of co-operativity in the case of human-machine dialogue. Whereas the maxims pass the test of correctness, they fail to provide a complete account of principles of co-operative human-machine dialogue. A more complete set of aspects of co-operative taskoriented dialogue is proposed together with the principles expressing those aspects. Transferability of results to co-operative spoken human-human ...

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