A Few Dialogue Strategies - Man-Machine Dialogue: Design and Challenges - page 125

Grice [GRI 75] considers that the dialogue is driven by a set of maxims, or
major principles, which allow the hearer and speaker to interpret and generate
relevant utterances. His cooperative principle is formulated thus: “Make your
contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the
accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are
engaged”, and his maxims are as follows: maxim of quantity (make your
contribution as informative as required; do not make your contribution more
informative than required), maxim of quality (do not say what you believe to
be false or that for which you lack adequate evidence), maxim of relevance
(make your contributions relevant), maxim of manner (avoid obscurity, avoid
ambiguity, be brief, be orderly). In spite of their vague aspects, for example
for the maxim of relevance, these principles have had a determining influence
on the following studies. The Geneva model of discourse analysis [ROU 85]
thus emphasizes two constraints arising from Gricean maxims, constraints
which play a role in determining dialogue structure: interaction completeness,
which tends to have the dialogue progress toward the satisfaction of both
speaker and hearer, and interactive completeness, which is the tendency, when
a conflict occurs, to solve this conflict. The Geneva model was then derived
and extended, especially to integrate not only linguistic criteria [REB 98,
p. 87], but also many other models, the starting point still remaining a
cooperation principle followed by speaker and hearer. The maxim of
relevance is completely reformulated by relevance theory which uses it as the
guiding line of a very sophisticated approach to inferences carried out in
cooperative dialogue [SPE 95]. More recently, Allwood et al. [ALL 00]
described an approach of the cooperation mechanism principles in dialogue
with joint purpose criteria, trust criteria and also cognitive and ethical
consideration criteria, which broaden the spectrum of application of the
Gricean maxims. The authors redefine the notions of coordination and
cooperation versus these four criteria to variable degrees. The common goal
(or joint purpose) is thus described as a degree of mutual contribution to a
shared purpose, a degree of mutual awareness of this shared purpose, a degree
of agreement made about purpose, a degree of dependence between purposes
and a degree of antagonism involved in the purposes. Another example is the
ethical consideration with, for example, the fact that we should not force
others, or prevent them from following their own motivations.
All these criteria and all this work allows us to get a general idea of the
coverage and complexity of mechanisms involved in dialogue. In addition,