Towards a Dialogue Taxonomy

Abstract

. Two interrelated points are made in this paper. First, that some of the characteristics of the language used in spoken dialogues are also observed in typed dialogues, since they are a reflection of the fact that it is a dialogue, rather than the fact that it is spoken. A corollary of this is that some of the results obtained in previous work on typed dialogue, especially Wizard of Oz simulations of human-computer natural language dialogues, can be of use to workers on spoken language dialogue systems. Second, it is claimed that we need a more fine grained taxonomy of different kinds of dialogues. Both for making it possible to make use of results obtained by other workers in developing dialogue systems, and for the development of our theoretical understanding of the influence of non-linguistic factors on the language used in human-computer dialogues. A number of such dimensions are described and their influence on the language used is illustrated by results from a empirical studies o..