Global and local attention in task-oriented conversation

The genre of task-oriented conversation has not received much attention within the linguistic literature, but its study is highly relevant for spoken dialogue systems, where dialogue is focused on accomplishing a concrete task. Using a sample of 30 dialogues, randomly selected from a larger corpus of appointment-scheduling dialogues, this paper investigates how speakers focus their global and local attention as the dialogue progresses. It is expected that the results of this empirical investigation will shed light on the global and local attentional features of this type of task-oriented conversations and will contribute to a better understanding of this important cognitive component of discourse processing.