Conversation with and through computers

Abstract. People design what they say specifically for their conversational partners, and they adapt to their partners over the course of a conversation. A comparison of keyboard conversations involving a simulated computer partner (as in a natural language interface) with those involving a human partner (as in teleconferencing) yielded striking differences and some equally striking similarities. For instance, there were significantly fewer acknowl-edgments in human/computer dialogue than in human/human. However, regardless of the conversational partner, people expected connectedness across conversational turns. In ad-dition, the style of a partner's response shaped what people subsequently typed. These results suggest some issues that need to be addressed before a natural language computer interface will be able to hold up its end of a conversation. Key words: discourse modeling, human/computer interaction, natural language inter-faces, recipient design. 1. Conversations with Computers Why is it that natural language has yet to become a widely used modality of human/computer interaction? Visionaries seem to have no difficulty imag