So let's see: Taking and keeping the initiative in collaborative dialogues

Abstract

In order to create and maintain social relationships with human users in mixed-initiative dialogues, IVAs have to give off coherent signals of claiming or relinquishing leadership in discourse. Quantitaive and qualitative analyses of human-human collaborative task-solving dialogues from the Ohio State University Quake Corpus reveal that discursive dominance is a shared achievement of speakers and given, taken or kept in a consensual way, up to the point where they incur "costs" in terms of efficiency in solving the task. Some verbal signals can be identified as relevant to this process. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.