Deutsches
Forschungszentrum
fOr
KOnstliche
Intelligenz
GmbH
Research
Report
RR-93-32
Conversation Acts
in
Task-Oriented Spoken Dialogue
David
R.
Traum, Elizabeth
A.
Hinkelman
December 1993
Deutsches Forschungszentrum fur Kunstliche Intelligenz
GmbH
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Deutsches Forschungszentrum
fur
KOnstliche Intelligenz
The German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (Deutsches Forschungszentrum
fOr
KOnstliche
Intelligenz, DFKI)
with sites in Kaiserslautern and SaarbrOcken is a non-profit organization which was
founded in 1988. The shareholder companies are Atlas Elektronik, Daimler-Benz, Fraunhofer
Gesellschaft, GMD,
IBM, Insiders, Mannesmann-Kienzle, SEMA Group, and Siemens. Research
projects conducted at the
DFKI are funded by the German Ministry for Research and Technology, by
the shareholder companies,
or
by other industrial contracts.
The DFKI conducts application-oriented basic research
in
the field of artificial intelligence and other
related subfields of computer science. The overall goal is to construct systems with technical
knowledge and common sense
which - by using
AI
methods - implement a problem solution for a
selected application area. Currently. there are the following research areas at the DFKI:
o Intelligent Engineering Systems
o Intelligent User Interfaces
o Computer Linguistics
o Programming Systems
o Deduction and Multiagent Systems
o Document Analysis and Office Automation.
The DFKI strives at making its research results available to the scientific community. There exist many
contacts to domestic and foreign research institutions, both
in
academy and industry. The DFKI hosts
technology transfer workshops for shareholders and other interested groups in order to inform about
the current state of research.
From its beginning, the
DFKI has provided an attractive working environment for
AI
researchers from
Germany and from all over the world. The goal is to have a staff of about 100 researchers at the end
of the building-up phase.
Friedrich J.
Wendl
Director
Conversation Acts in Task-Oriented Spoken Dialogue
David R.
Traum,
Elizabeth
A.
Hinkelman
DF
KI
-RR-93-32
Also appeared
in
/ as:
Computational Intelligence, Volume
8,
Number
3,
August 1992, p. 575-599,
Blackwelll Publishers, Cambridge MA and Oxford UK
University of Rochester, Department of Computer Science,
Technical Report 425,
June 1992
This work has been supported by a grant from The
Federal Ministry for Research
and
Technology (FKZ ITW-9002
0)
.
© Deutsches Forschungszentrum
fUr
Kunstliche Intelligenz 1993
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Deutsches Forschungszentrum
fUr
Kunstliche Intelligenz.
Conversation Acts in Task-Oriented Spoken Dialogue
David
R.
Traum·
Computer
Science
Department
University
of
Rochester
Roche
s
ter
, New York 14627
USA
traum
@
cs.rochester.edu
Elizabeth
A.
Hinkelman
DFKI
Stuhlsatzenhausweg
3
D-W-6600
Saarbruecken
11,
Germany
hinkelman
@
dfki.uni-sb.de
Abstract
A linguistic form's compositional, timeless meaning can be surrounded
or
even contra-
dicted by various social, aesthetic,
or
analogistic companion meanings.
This
paper
addresses
a series
of
problems in
the
structure
of spoken language discourse, including turn-taking
and
grounding.
It
views these processes as composed
of
fine-grained actions, which resemble
speech acts
both
in resulting from a computational mechanism
of
planning
and
in having a
rich relationship
to
the
specific linguistic features which serve
to
indicate their presence.
The
resulting notion
of
Conversation Acts is more general
than
speech act theory, en-
compassing
not
only
the
traditional
speech acts
but
turn
-taking, grounding,
and
higher-level
argumentation acts as well. Furthermore,
the
traditional
speech acts
in
this scheme become
fully joint actions, whose successful performance requires full listener participation.
This
paper
presents a detailed analysis
of
spoken language dialogue.
It
shows
the
role
of each class of conversation acts in discourse
structure,
and
discusses how members
of
each
class can be recognized in conversation.
Conversation acts,
it
will be seen,
better
account
for
the
success
of
conversation
than
speech act theory alone.
·supported
in
part
by
the
NSF
under
research
grant
no. IRI-9003841,
by
ONR
under
research
grant
no.
NOOOl4-90-J-1811 ,
and
by
DARPA/ONR
under
contract
N00014-92-J-lS12.