Negotiation , compromise , and collaboration in interpersonal and human – computer conversations

People are very adept at recognizing when something they said has been misunderstood by a conversational partner and at recognizing when they themselves have misunderstood something that was said earlier in the conversation. In either case, they will usually say something to repair the situation and regain mutual understanding. The same is true of non-understanding. If computers are ever to converse with humans in natural language, they must be as adept as people are in their ability to detect and repair both their own occasional misunderstandings and also those of their conversational partner—perhaps even more so, as this skill will be needed to compensate for the likely deficiencies of computers in other aspects of understanding, which will lead to frequent misunderstandings and non-understandings on each side. The processes through which conversational repairs take place include negotiation, collaboration, and construction of meaning. They can be seen in examples such as the following fragment from the London–Lund Corpus of English Conversation (Svartvik and Quirk, 1980, S.2.4a: 1–8); here, A is a visitor in B’s house.