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Chapter 2
Man-Machine Dialogue Fields
The term dialogue refers to the different types of interaction between two
people and characterizes a certain use of language. Clark [CLA 96, p. 23]
presents six proposals covering the use of language: it has a social goal; it is a
joint action; it involves the meaning desired by the speaker and interpreted by
the hearer; it often involves more than one activity; its study is both a cognitive
and a social science. These proposals allow us to start identifying the fields
involved in dialogue studies: not only linguistics and pragmatics, of course,
but also social sciences and cognitive sciences. We will discuss these aspects
in this chapter, with a goal of finding application possibilities of MMD for
these studies.
At the end of Chapter 1, we mentioned a list of professions that could
create a work team to design an MMD system. This list came from [HAR 04]
and mostly puts emphasis on computer-related professions. We could very
well imagine the team to include linguists, sociologists and psychologists. We
can also, or mostly, imagine that it includes specialists of the touching zones
between these fields, especially researchers positioning themselves between
linguistics and computer science, and who help develop systems by extracting
and formalizing linguistic theories and models, which they believe can be
applied to MMD. The application of a linguistic theory to MMD can require
its simplification, or at least its transformation so as to obtain a slightly
different linguistic theory which is nonetheless able to be directly
implemented and thus tested. This is what happened for most of the systems
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