Article published in:

Dialogue across Media
Edited by Jarmila Mildorf and Bronwen Thomas
[Dialogue Studies 28] 2017
► pp. 179–202

Dialogue with computers

Dialogue games in action

Paul Piwek

With the advent of digital personal assistants for mobile devices, systems that are marketed as engaging in (spoken) dialogue have reached a wider public than ever before. For a student of dialogue, this raises the question to what extent such systems are genuine dialogue partners. In order to address this question, this study proposes to use the concept of a dialogue game as an analytical tool. Thus, we reframe the question as asking for the dialogue games that such systems play. Our analysis, as applied to a number of landmark systems and illustrated with dialogue extracts, leads to a fine-grained classification of such systems. Drawing on this analysis, we propose that the uptake of future generations of more powerful dialogue systems will depend on whether they are self-validating. A self-validating dialogue system can not only talk and do things, but also discuss the why of what it says and does, and learn from such discussions.

Published online: 19 January 2017
https://doi.org/10.1075/ds.28.10piw

References

Ahn, René, Robbert-Jan Beun, Tijn Borghuis, Harry Bunt, and Cees van Overveld

1995 “The DenK-architecture: A Fundamental Approach to User-interfaces.” Artificial Intelligence Review 8 (3): 431-445.

Aust, Harald, Martin Oerder, Frank Seide, and Volker Steinbiss

1995 “The Philips Automatic Train Timetable Information System.” Speech Communication 17: 249–262.

Beun, Robbert-Jan

2001 “On the Generation of Coherent Dialogue: A Computational Approach.” Pragmatics and Cognition 9 (1): 37-68.

Bobrow, Daniel G., Ronald M. Kaplan, Martin Kay, Donald A. Norman, Henry Thompson, and Terry Winograd

1977 “GUS, A Frame-Driven Dialog System.” Artificial Intelligence 8: 155-173.

Bos, Johan, Ewan Klein, Oliver Lemon, and Tetsushi Oka

2003 “DIPPER: Description and Formalisation of an Information-State Update Dialogue System Architecture”. In 4th SIGdial Workshop on Discourse and Dialogue , 115-124. Sapporo, Japan.

Brandom, Robert

1994 Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Bunt, Harry C., and Ab F.V. Van Katwijk

1979 “Dialogue Acts as Elements of a Language Game.” In Linguistics in the Netherlands 1977-1979, ed. by Wim Zonneveld and Fred Weerman, 264-282. Dordrecht: Foris Publications.

Ginzburg, Jonathan

2012 The Interactive Stance: Meaning for Conversation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hamblin, Charles L.

1970 Fallacies. London: Methuen.

Gregoromichelaki, Eleni, Ruth Kempson, Matthew Purver, Gregory J. Mills, Ronnie Cann, Wilfried Meyer-Viol, and Patrick G.T. Healey

2011 “Incrementality and Intention-Recognition in Utterance Processing.” Dialogue and Discourse 2 (1): 199–233.

Kempson, Ruth, Wilfried Meyer-Viol, and Dov Gabbay

2001 Dynamic Syntax: The Flow of Language Understanding. Oxford: Blackwell.

Kuyten, Patrick, Timothy Bickmore, Svetlana Stoyanchev, Paul Piwek, Helmut Prendinger, and Mitsura Ishizuka

2012 “Fully Automated Generation of Question-Answer Pairs for Scripted Virtual Instruction.” In Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents , 12-14 September 2012, Santa Cruz, CA, USA.

Larsson, Staffan, and David Traum

2003 “The Information State Approach to Dialogue Management.” In Current and New Directions in Discourse and Dialogue, ed. by Ronnie Smith and Jan Kuppevelt, 325-353. Dordrecht: Kluwer.

Lemon, Oliver, and Olivier Pietquin

(eds) 2012 Data-Driven Methods for Adaptive Spoken Dialogue Systems: Computational Learning for Conversational Interfaces. Berlin: Springer.

Leuski, Anton, and David Traum

2008 “A Statistical Approach for Text Processing in Virtual Humans.” In Proceedings of the 26th Army Science Conference , Orlando, Florida, USA, December 2008.

OED Online

. June 2015 “dialogue | dialog, n.” Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com.libezproxy.open.ac.uk/view/Entry/51915?isAdvanced=false&result=1&rskey=Y4sGSP & (accessed June 29, 2015).

Piwek, Paul

1998 Logic, Information and Conversation. PhD Thesis, Eindhoven: Eindhoven University of Technology.

Piwek, Paul, and Svetlana Stoyanchev

2010 “Generating Expository Dialogue from Monologue: Motivation, Corpus and Preliminary Rules.” In 11th Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL) , Los Angeles, USA, 333-336.

Piwek, Paul

2011 “Three Principles of Information Flow: Conversation as a Dialogue Game.” In Perspectives on Information, ed. by Magnus Ramage and David Chapman, 106-120. New York: Routledge.

2014 “Towards a Computational Account of Inferentialist Meaning.” In Proceedings of the Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and the Simulation of Behaviour (AISB50) , London.

Power, Richard

1979 “The Organisation of Purposeful Dialogues.” Linguistics 17: 107–152.

Plüss, Brian, Paul Piwek, and Richard Power

2011 “Modelling Non-Cooperative Dialogue: The Role of Conversational Games.” In Proceedings of the 15th Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue , 212–213, Los Angeles, California, 21–23 September 2011.

Plüss, Brian

2014 A Computational Model of Non-Cooperation in Natural Language Dialogue. PhD thesis, The Open University, Milton Keynes.

Reeves, Byron, and Clifford Nass

1996 The Media Equation: How People Treat Computers, Television, and New Media Like Real People and Places. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Stenius, Erik

1967 “Mood and Language Game.” Synthese 17 (1): 254-274.

Tintarev, Nava, Roman Kutlak, Nir Oren, Kees van Deemter, Matt J.Green, Judith Masthoff, and Wamberto Vasconcelos

2013 “SAsSy – Scrutable Autonomous Systems.” In Proceedings of the Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and the Simulation of Behaviour (AISB) , Exeter.

Turing, Alan

1950 “Computing Machinery and Intelligence.” Mind, LIX vol. 2236: 433–460. (Citation from The Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence, 1990. ed. by Margaret A. Boden. Oxford: Oxford University Press.)

Twain, Mark

1919 What is Man? London: Chatto and Windus.

Walker, Marilyn, Diane Litman, Candace Kamm, and Alicia Abella

1997 “PARADISE: A Framework for Evaluating Spoken Dialogue Agents.” In Proceedings of the 35th Annual Meeting of the Association of Computational Linguistics (ACL 97) , Madrid, Spain.

Weizenbaum, Joseph

1966 “Eliza – A Computer Program for the Study of Natural Language Communication Between Man and Machine.” Communications of the ACM 9 (1): 36-45.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

1994 [1958] The Blue and Brown Books: Preliminary Studies for the ‘Philosophical Investigations, 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell.

Cited by

Cited by other publications

Bibauw, Serge, Thomas François & Piet Desmet

2019. Discussing with a computer to practice a foreign language: research synthesis and conceptual framework of dialogue-based CALL. Computer Assisted Language Learning 32:8 ► pp. 827 ff.

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 03 april 2020. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.