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

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.