Dialogue

Research on dialogue deals with the study of language as it is used in conversation. Dialogue is a multi-agent activity and this makes conversational language markedly different from the kind of language found in texts. This chapter introduces the main phenomena that characterize language in dialogue interaction—including disfluencies, dialogue acts, alignment, grounding, and turn taking—and discusses some of the key approaches to modelling dialogue that are fundamental in computational dialogue research. Research on dialogue deals with the study of language as it is used in spontaneous conversation. Dialogue is a multi-agent activity that takes place in real time, with speakers interacting with each other in an online fashion. This makes conversational language markedly different from the kind of language found in texts and brings in new challenges for computational linguistics. This chapter introduces the main phenomena that characterize language in dialogue interaction—including disfluencies, dialogue acts, alignment, grounding, and turn taking—and discusses some of the key approaches to modelling dialogue that are fundamental in computational research, such as dialogue act taxonomies and dynamic semantic theories of dialogue.