Looking for a Process Model of Dialogue: Speculations from the Perspective of Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

My aim here is to attempt to determine some of the rules that may legitimately be used for the process of response creation in a conversational setting. My assumption is that people bring a great deal of background information and rules about how to interpret what someone really means to the conversational setting. The process of communication is extremely complex, hence it is possible to make many different responses to a sentence. Also, sometimes the very act of not taking one of these options can be a statement in itself. Thus a large part of the conversational process takes place under the surface of the actual conversation. Our task, then, in trying to spell out the rules that people use in conversing, is to respond to all of what is going on, rather than solely to what is going on at the surface.