Conventions in human-human multi-threaded dialogues: a preliminary study

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we explore the conventions that people use in managing multiple dialogue threads. In particular, we focus on where in a thread people interrupt when switching to another thread. We find that some subjects are able to vary where they switch depending on how urgent the interrupting task is. When time-allowed, they switched at the end of a discourse segment, which we hypothesize is less disruptive to the interrupted task when it is later resumed.

REFERENCES

• 1: Peter A. Heeman , Fan Yang , Susan E. Strayer, DialogueView: an annotation tool for dialogue, Proceedings of the 3rd SIGdial workshop on Discourse and dialogue, p.50-59, July 11-12, 2002, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania [doi>10.3115/1118121.1118129]
• 2: A. L. Kun, W. T. Miller, and W. H. Lenharth. Project54: Introducing advanced technologies in the police cruiser. In Proceedings of the 2002 Spring IEEE Vehicular Technology Conference, Birmingham, AL, May 2002.
• 3: D. C. McFarlane. Comparison of four primary methods for coordinating the interruption of people in human-computer interaction. Human-Computer Interaction, 17(1):63--139, 2002.
• 4: Lance A. Ramshaw, A three-level model for plan exploration, Proceedings of the 29th annual meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics, p.39-46, June 18-21, 1991, Berkeley, California [doi>10.3115/981344.981350]
• 5: Carolyn Penstein Rosé , Barbara Di Eugenio , Lori S. Levin , Carol Van Ess-Dykema, Discourse processing of dialogues with multiple threads, Proceedings of the 33rd annual meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics, p.31-38, June 26-30, 1995, Cambridge, Massachusetts [doi>10.3115/981658.981663]
• 6: S. Sutton et al. Universal speech tools: the CSLU toolkit. In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (ICSLP-98), pages 3221--3224, Sydney Australia, November 1998.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.2 User Interfaces (D.2.2, H.1.2, I.3.6)
          Subjects: Natural language

General Terms:
Experimentation, Human Factors, Performance

Keywords:
dialogue, multi-tasking, speech interface