Communicative Resources

1. Communicative Resources

2. How Do We Communicate? • Conversation involves more than language • Gestures, facial expressions, tone of voice, … • Face-to-face has widest range of information • Written text removes all of this additional information • Conversation as ensemble work • Should not be viewed as alternating series of actions • Listeners provide feedback during expression that crucially affects speaker

3. Conversational Organization • Local control • Turn taking as collaborative action • Ordered set of options at turnover: • Speaker selects next speaker • Self-selection • Current speaker continues • Silences are ambiguous (gap or pause) • Know people who are frustrating to talk to because they break these rules • They do not provide gaps • They step in when there is no opening • Some people apply rules to interactions with machines

4. Sequential Organization and Coherence • Reply should be related to preceding sentence or becomes a non-sequitur • How we judge intelligence? • Absence of reply is also a reply due to social contract of conversation • Rules are neither optional or obligatory • Statements provide context for answer in unpredictable ways • “I gotta work.” or “Cream and sugar?” • Referent can be part or whole conversation

5. Locating and Remedying Trouble • Conversational pattern supports this • Gaps provide opportunities for • Requests for clarification • Statements that can indicate misinterpretation • Lack of turn taking can signify breakdown • Example of palpitations and feet • “A crucial part of interactional competence is the ability to judge whether some evidence that the recipient has misunderstood warrants the work required for repair.”

6. Specialized Forms of Conversation • Legal and medical questioning • Limits (but does not get rid of) conversational options for listener • Conversational forms can cause problems • Doctors start hypothesizing before collecting all symptoms • Relationship to human-computer communication

7. Case of the Complex Copier

8. Case of the Complex Copier • Expert help system • Maps user’s goals to job specification to plans • Goals constrained by functionality • Plans must accommodate semi-ordered actions • Plans recognized part-way points • Changes in preconditions • Some actions produce recognizable effects

9. Instructions • Following instructions turns partial descriptions into concrete actions • Instructions rely on recipient’s ability to anchor descriptions • Although system/we see only effect of that • Execution can include “unpredictable” interpretations (e.g. lucky pan) • Communicating instructions can rely on a combination of language, materials, history • Existence of interaction more important to success than whether instructions are written or spoken

10. Method • Keep (video++) record of action as well as interpretations • Dual role of lists (as intended action and as performed action) • Two people working together • Motivate communication about interpretationof instructions that can be captured • Model actions vs. shared understanding