A Few Dialogue Strategies - Man-Machine Dialogue: Design and Challenges - page 127

language, and we cannot consider its behavior as cooperating on an interaction
point of view. A system may thus find it very beneficial to add interactivity,
which can not only create variations in the types of phrase, but also vary the
intervention content, and thus add, for example, a short utterance in charge of
linking the user's intervention with the system's. Denis [DEN 08, p. 67] thus
provides various possible answers to the user's request “I would like to go to
Paris”:
- “when would you like to leave?”: react on one of the missing parameters
in the request, that is initiate a relevant contribution;
- “OK. When would you like to leave?”: acknowledge and then react on
the request;
- “to Paris. When would you like to leave?”: repeat the only parameter
given by the user, which allows it, on the one hand, to acknowledge it and, on
the other hand, to let the user check that its request has been understood, at
least on this point (if it is not the case, the user can then immediately react);
- “you want to go to Paris. When would you like to leave?”: emphatic
repetition, which can take on various aspects of paraphrase, from the user's
entire utterance, which works as an acknowledgment as well as evidence that
it is understood and allows the user to react immediately in case there is a
mistake.
We remain here in cases in which the system speaks once the user has
finished his/her utterance, and vice versa, in other words, in alternating
interactions. Yet, conversational analysis studies have underlined the
diversity, in human dialogue, of speaking turn organization phenomena,
sequence and segment organization phenomena, reparation organization
phenomena, etc. [SAC 74]. The recorded corpora have shown that a dialogue
is not just an ordered sequence of utterances. A dialogue between speaker and
hearer involves two communication channels operating simultaneously: the
main channel which is the speaker leading the dialogue at a given moment,
and the backchannel occupied, for example, by listening hints given by the
hearer. These hints can be given as non-lexical sounds or short utterances with
a speech act translating acknowledgment or even comprehension such as
“hmm”, “yes” or even “oh really”. They can also take on the shape of
completing the speaker's utterance or even repeating part of it. In any case,
because they are brief and do not really constitute a speaking turn, they do not