A Few Dialogue Strategies - Man-Machine Dialogue: Design and Challenges - page 130

set of dialogue strategies such as: anticipated negotiation, an argumentative
strategy aiming to anticipate any counter-arguments that could be opposed
and immediately refute them (“you could believe that it is more expensive by
going through Versailles, but it isn't ...”); factual negotiation, a discourse
strategy which focuses on agreeing on the basis of certain decisive facts to
carry on the interaction; interaction negotiation, a strategy aiming to impose a
image of itself and the other during the interaction; meta-discursive
negotiation, aiming to give indications which allow us to retroactively
interpret the function of an intervention or even meta-interaction negotiation,
aiming to define the rights and obligations of the speaker and hearer. To
correctly apply these strategies, we have to identify the chains of discursive
acts, which Moeschler suggests thanks to the notion of discursive movement,
a kind of structure that brings together several argumentative acts, and on the
basis of their direction allows him to identify the cases of argumentative
concession or conclusion.
Moreover, managing an argumentative dialogue involves interruption
possibilities: contrary to a request or narration, for which the hearer usually
waits for the end of the utterance, an argumentative intervention can spur the
hearer to interrupt the speaker, to kill an argument before it is completely
uttered. This is what Dessalles [DES 08, p. 17] shows by starting from the
observation - which he arrived at after a corpus study - that hearers are often
able to anticipate the nature of the argument before it is completely expressed.
The interruption then becomes a (somewhat brutal) dialogue strategy which
can be taken into account by an MMD system. Even though these dialogue
strategies can theoretically be applied to any type of dialogue, let us, however,
note that they remain more relevant in the case of negotiation and
argumentation dialogue than in the case of command or information
dialogues.
A final aspect that also takes on a particular importance in this type of
dialogue is coherence and cohesion management. We have to identify the
relations between several utterances, a bit like the argumentative relations do.
Prévot [PRÉ 04] summarizes this question which has sparked many linguistic
research studies, and draws a line between a semantic coherence, which is
mostly spatial and temporal; an implicit coherence, covering the aspects
related to intentions, content and some dialogue conventions and surface hints
which define cohesion: information structure, ellipses, anaphora and
coreference chains, that is linguistic phenomena which go beyond the borders
of the sentence. Moeschler [MOE 85, p. 190] adds argumentative coherence,