Control and Initiative in Collaborative Problem Solving Dialogues

In this paper we first question whether control and initiative are as synchronous as current usages appear to make them. We provide some evidence from a corpus of collaborative problem solving dialogues that control should apply to the dialogue level and initiative to the problem solving level. We then ask what role these two phenomena have in mixed initiative dialogues and present an example of how the recognition of lack of initiative at the problem solving level is cued by control at the dialogue level.