From: AAAI Technical Report SS-97-04. Compilation copyright © 1997, AAAI (www.aaai.org). All rights reserved.
Questions on Violations of MixedInitiative
Candy Sidner
Lotus Development Corp.
csidner@lotus.corn
http://www.lotus.com/research/2112.htm
ABSTRACT
Thisnotedetails a set of questionsaboutmixedinitiative andargues
for a compendium
of the kinds of violations that can occur in
dialog.
COLLABORATIONIN DIAIX~UE
I havebeenexploringcollaborativeinterface agents(Rich&Sidner
1996, Rich &Sidner 1997a,b). Our interface agent follows some
verysimplerules for releasingits turn in its ongoingdialogueswith
a user. Similarand therefore rather stilted conventionsare also
followedby the user. If weare to improvethis behavior,wemust
understandwhat counts as legal and illegal mixedinitiative
behavior.
Schegeloff(1968)oncecharacterizeda turn in conversation
being about one bit of information. Whilethis was hardly a
quantifiable measure,it offers a starting point for whatmust
constitute a turn. Clark and Schaefer (1989) argue that
conversationproceedsby contributions that specify and ground
somecontent,withthe viewthat all conversation
is collaborative.
VIOLATIONSOF MIXRDINITIATIVE
I aminterested in the questionof characterizingviolations of the
rides for mixedinitiative. Whenhas a participant said too much?
Cana participantsay too little? If conversation
is, as I haveargued
(Sidner94, Grosz&Sidner86),to establish mutualbelief, then how
muchmutualbelief canone participant expressbefore turningover
the conversationto another? At whatpoint are there "too many"
mutualbeliefs expressedbya participantin the dialogue,andhence
a violation of mixedinitiative (i.e. the conversationhas become
lecture or is unintelligible)?Whatcausesa turn to violate rules of
initiative? Is it becausethe conversationloosesits collaborative
format,or becausethe contentof a turn is unintelligibleor because
the receivingparticipantis somehow
preventedfromtakinga turn?
Becauseconversationis a formof collaboration, can the other
participant (s) prevent a turn from being illegal by providing
acknowledgements
via backchanneling?Andis "tumingover" the
conversation a correct characterization of howconversation
proceedsor do participants "take" the conversationfromothers?
Dowe havea corpusof exampleviolations, evenif the violations
canonlybe seenas suchbasedonintuitive criteria at this time?
Asimplecase of the questionof violationsof the rules for mixed
initiatives concerns acknowledgements
and acceptances,t When
acknowledging or accepting the contents of the previous
participant’s turn, whatviolations can occur?Certainlythe most
obviouswouldbe to acknowledge
a tumthat the participant did not
151
really hear or to accept one that did not makesense. More
complex
patterns are possible. If a participant conductsa lengthy
turn during whichthe other participant interjects "uh-huhs"and
other acceptancebackchannels,after whichthe other participant
takes the floor and proceedsto ask questionsof informationabout
whatthey did not understand,is such a behaviora violation of
mixedinitiative or is it merelythoughtlessor impolite?
In the symposium
on Computational
Modelsfor MixedInitiative
Interaction,I thinkviolationsof mixedinitiative are critical to our
understanding of what must be modelled, as ungrammatical
sentencesare for parsingtechnology.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thanksto ChuckRich, MERL
for his comments
on this note.
REFERENCES
Clare H.H. and E. F. Schaefer1989. Conlributingto Discourse,
CognitiveScience,13(2): 259-294.
Grosz, B. G. and C.L. Sidner 1986. Attention, Intention and the
Structure of Discourse.Computational
Linguistics, Vol. 12, No.
3:175-204.
.
Rich, C. and C.L. Sidner 1996. Addinga Collaborative Agentto
GraphicalUserInterfaces, in the Proceedingsof the NinthAnnual
Symposiumon User Interface Software and Technology(UIST
96), Seattle, Washington.
Rich, C. andC.L. Sidner1997a.Segmented
Interaction Historyin a
CollaborativeInterface Agent,in the Proceedingsof the Third
International Conference
on Intelligent UserInterfaces, Orlando,
Florida.
Rich, C. and C.L. Sidner 1997b. COLLAGEN:
WhenAgents
Collaborate with People, in the Proceedings of the First
International Conferenceon Autonomous
Agents,MarinaDel Rey,
CA.
Schegeloff, E. 1968. Sequencingin conversational openings.
AmericanAnthropologist,70, 1075.
Sidner, C.L. 1994. An Artificial Discourse Language for
Collaborative Negotiation. in the Proceedingsof the Twelfth
National Conferenceon Artificial Intelligence, Vol.1, 814-819,
MITPress, Cambridge,MA.
1Acknowledgements
are utterances
(full or partial)that indicateto
participantthat their utteranceswereheardandunderstood.
Acceptance
areutterances
that indicatethattheutterance
is believed.