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Dialogue has its origins in joint activities, which it serves to coordinate. Joint activities, in turn, usually emerge in hierarchically nested projects and subprojects. We propose that participants use dialogue to coordinate two kinds of transitions in these joint projects: vertical transitions, or entering and exiting joint projects; and horizont...
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... Map Task ( Anderson et al., 1991): One hundred and twenty-eight dialogues between 64 students of the University of Glasgow, Scotland, describing routes on a map. Table 1 gives an overview of the eight corpora, including number of words in each corpus. ...
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End-to-end dialogue generation has achieved promising results without using handcrafted features and attributes specific for each task and corpus. However, one of the fatal drawbacks in such approaches is that they are unable to generate informative utterances, so it limits their usage from some real-world conversational applications. This paper at...
Citations
... Interactants need to coordinate how to move from one part of the project to the next. [3] proposed that there are two kinds of generic transitions in the joint action hierarchy. Horizontal transitions involve continuing to the next step within a project or subproject (e.g., moving from washing ingredients to chopping). ...
... These markers have been previously studied as backchannels [4], continuers [5], acknowledgment tokens [6], or discourse markers [7]. [3] proposed to regroup these words into the category of project markers, suggesting that different lexi-* These authors share last authorship. cal forms may be specialised for marking vertical vs. horizontal transitions. ...
... Such findings might have application in automatic speech processing of conversational data, where speech act recognition still remains a challenge. Further, this study advances our understanding of the transition-specific use of project markers for languages beyond English and German [3]. ...
Joint activities (e.g. building a LEGO model) unfold in a hierarchy of subprojects. Navigating them implies horizontally elaborating on a subproject (placing one block) and vertically moving to a new subproject (next block). Interactants coordinate horizontal and vertical transitions with project markers (okay, yeah). We suggest that vertical vs. horizontal transitions are distinguished both lexically and acoustically. We predicted that acoustic features of identical markers used for different transitions (okay-vertical vs. okay-horizontal) would exhibit more dissimilarity than markers used for same transitions (okay-vertical vs. okay-vertical). We used MFCC-based dynamic time warping to measure dissimilarity between vocalisations and analysed them with a Bayesian regression model. We find that Vietnamese speakers use both lexical and acoustic cues to mark transitions, and paired same-horizontal markers are acoustically more similar than same-vertical and different-transition markers.
... When endowed with a set of culturally-transmitted conventions for the meanings of words and phrases, groups are able to coordinate their expectations and actions, even when their interactions are brief and relevant concepts are unfamiliar (Hawkins, Frank, & Goodman, 2020;H. H. Clark & Wilkes-Gibbs, 1986;Bangerter & Clark, 2003;H. H. Clark, 2005). ...
A large program of research has aimed to ground large-scale cultural phenomena in processes taking place within individual minds. For example, investigating whether individual agents equipped with the right social learning strategies can enable cumulative cultural evolution given long enough time horizons. However, this approach often omits the critical group-level processes that mediate between individual agents and multi-generational societies. Here, we argue that interacting groups are a necessary and explanatory level of analysis, linking individual and collective intelligence through two characteristic feedback loops. In the first loop, more sophisticated individual-level social learning mechanisms based on Theory of Mind facilitate group-level complementarity, allowing distributed knowledge to be compositionally recombined in groups; these group-level innovations, in turn, ease the cognitive load on individuals. In the second loop, societal-level processes of cumulative culture provide groups with new cognitive technologies, including shared language and conceptual abstractions, which set in motion new group-level processes to further coordinate, recombine, and innovate. Taken together, these cycles establish group-level interaction as a dual engine of intelligence, catalyzing both individual cognition and cumulative culture.
... Although it often refers to the outcome of a bid for a position (Bangerter & Clark, 2003), here I use uptake to indicate that a subject position was invoked or lived in an interactional episode. I coded uptakes as either inhabitance, a smooth uptake, or agentic, when the enactment diverged from the locally normative version of the position. ...
Multiply minoritized learners face racialized, gendered, and ableist hierarchies of mathematical ability that shape the organization of schools and classrooms and can significantly challenge access to identities as mathematical learners and practitioners as well as to fundamental human dignity. Classrooms and everyday interactions can perpetuate or interrupt these conditions. Contributing to questions about the relationships among identity, power, and dignity in mathematics learning, this article presents a positional interaction analysis of Gisela, a Disabled 10th-grade Latina student, as she took up, challenged, and renegotiated identities of mathematical thinker, learner, and community member over the course of one school year.
... These terms stress the metalinguistic nature of these contributions, which help in managing the interaction but, for the most part, provide little new information content themselves. While these commentaries or feedback also frequently occur in more symmetric interactions (e.g. a free conversation), they tend to be less frequent than in asymmetric task-oriented contexts (Bangerter & Herbert, 2003;Fusaroli et al., 2017). ...
While studies have shown the importance of listener feedback in dialogue, we still know little about the factors that impact its quality. Feedback can either indicate that the addressee is aligning with the speaker (i.e. “positive” feedback) or that there is some communicative trouble (i.e. “negative” feedback). This study provides an in-depth account of listener feedback in task-oriented dialogue (a director-matcher game), where positive and negative feedback is produced, thus expressing both alignment and misalignment. By manipulating the listener’s cognitive load through a secondary mental task, we measure the effect of divided attention on the quantity and quality of feedback. Our quantitative analysis shows that performance and feedback quantity remain stable across cognitive load conditions, but that the timing and novelty of feedback vary: turns are produced after longer pauses when attention is divided between two speech-focused tasks, and they are more economical (i.e. include more other-repetitions) when unrelated words need to be retained in memory. These findings confirm that cognitive load impacts the quality of listener feedback. Finally, we found that positive feedback is more often generic and shorter than negative feedback, and that its proportion increases over time.
... Backchannels are subtle cues produced by the listener in a conversation (Bangerter & Clark, 2003;Gardner, 2001;Schegloff, 1982;Yngve, 1970). They often overlap with the speaker's utterance and are not considered an interruption or turn but rather a signal of positive evidence that the two interlocutors are on the same page, that is, that they have a mutual understanding. ...
... Evidence for contextual variations in the use of conversational devices in conversation supports arguments for the adaptive nature of these variations. Backchannels and repairs have been conceptually linked to the ability to navigate and jointly solve complex conversational tasks (Bangerter & Clark, 2003;Clark & Brennan, 1991;Mills, Groningen, & Redeker, 2017). Further, linguistic entrainment has been more directly associated with performance, both conceptually and experimentally, albeit the results are not fully consistent across studies, perhaps due to methodological differences Dideriksen et al., 2023;Duran et al., 2019;Fusaroli, Bjørndahl, Roepstorff, & Tylén, 2016;Healey et al., 2014;Reitter & Moore, 2014;Tylén, Fusaroli, Østergaard, Smith, & Arnoldi, 2023). ...
Establishing and maintaining mutual understanding in everyday conversations is crucial. To do so, people employ a variety of conversational devices, such as backchannels, repair, and linguistic entrainment. Here, we explore whether the use of conversational devices might be influenced by cross‐linguistic differences in the speakers’ native language, comparing two matched languages—Danish and Norwegian—differing primarily in their sound structure, with Danish being more opaque, that is, less acoustically distinguished. Across systematically manipulated conversational contexts, we find that processes supporting mutual understanding in conversations vary with external constraints: across different contexts and, crucially, across languages. In accord with our predictions, linguistic entrainment was overall higher in Danish than in Norwegian, while backchannels and repairs presented a more nuanced pattern. These findings are compatible with the hypothesis that native speakers of Danish may compensate for its opaque sound structure by adopting a top‐down strategy of building more conversational redundancy through entrainment, which also might reduce the need for repairs. These results suggest that linguistic differences might be met by systematic changes in language processing and use. This paves the way for further cross‐linguistic investigations and critical assessment of the interplay between cultural and linguistic factors on the one hand and conversational dynamics on the other.
... It is important to recognize that dialogue is valuable instrumentally, in that it enables a team to collaborate more efficiently and effectively [38]. In particular, dialogue can remediate the chronic and acute communication conditions that can undermine project success, which are represented by the list in Table 5.1. ...
Communication—the conversations, connections, and combinations that bring new insights to complex problems—is at the heart of successful crossdisciplinary collaboration (National Academy of Sciences, Committee on Facilitating Interdisciplinary Research and Committee on Science Engineering and Public Policy (NAS), (2004). Facilitating Interdisciplinary Research. National Academies Press, Washington, DC). In the spirit of “practice makes permanent”, teams will benefit from practicing structured dialogue in which deep engagement with one’s collaborators is the norm rather than the exception. This type of practice can help teams create a dialogical communication culture that establishes deep listening and close engagement as community norms. In this chapter, the authors describe the Toolbox dialogue method, a specific approach to structured dialogue designed to encourage a dialogical communication culture. Instructions are provided for using the Toolbox dialogue method, which can support teams in working through challenges and successfully pursuing project objectives in practice sessions as brief as 10 minutes.KeywordsCollaborationDialogueReflexivityPerspective takingInterdisciplinaryToolbox
... In this study, we examined the role of familiarity in collaborative learning in younger and older adults using the Map Task. The Map Task was selected 51,52 as it is an ecologically valid measure of real-life communication that has been used extensively in linguistic research [53][54][55][56] . In the Map Task, pairs must work together to plan and execute a route, doing so through natural conversation without restrictions. ...
As we age, learning new knowledge and skills becomes more difficult due to age-related changes to cognition. Learning collaboratively could counteract these changes, and perhaps more so when working with someone familiar. This study examined whether collaborative learning is affected by age and partner familiarity. Forty-eight participants (younger n = 24, older n = 24) completed the Map Task with a familiar and unfamiliar same-age partner. Participants became more efficient at completing the Map Task over time, regardless of age and partner familiarity. There was no age difference in immediate or 1-hour recall, but younger adults recalled more after 7 days than older adults. Overall, results suggest that collaborative learning outcomes are unaffected by age or partner familiarity, and that collaborative learning has short-term protective effects on memory, with age-related declines only emerging after 7 days.
... The beginning and endings are marked either through verbal utterances or brief pauses, and there is generally some kind of acceptance of the projects, its beginning or end, by Lisbeth (cf. Bangerter and Clark, 2003). The starts are marked either by a small verbal utterance (Line 02; 05) or most often each is preceded by a small pause (Line 07,08,09,10,15,16,17,and 18). ...
This study shows how concerted bodily movements and particularly intercorporeality play a central role in interaction, particularly in joint activities with people with late-stage dementia. Direct involvement of bodies in care situations makes intercorporeal collaboration the basic form for engaging with people with late-stage dementia. By detailed analysis of a videorecording of a joint activity involving a person with late-stage dementia as an example, we show that the process of concerted bodily movements includes not only an interactive bodywork but also a reconfiguration of the routine activities and actions in situ. Reconfigurations often require, and are the outcome of, particular practices for the systematic modification of the embodied conducts of the participants and their use of artifacts in the surrounding environment. These practices, that we highlight in our study, are (1) staging activities through organization and re-organization of body parts, as well as artifacts (rather than using verbal descriptions of activities); (2) decomposing (parsing) activities into smaller parts possible for the person with dementia to perform (rather than using verbal action descriptions); and (3) providing embodied directions and bodily demonstrations of actions (rather than using verbal directives). As a result, we point to these practices for their reflexive roles in the change of the use of modalities in interaction: from mainly using verbal language to the prominence of visual depiction and bodily demonstration as necessary methods to facilitate the participation of people with latestage dementia in joint activities.
... However, the interaction is actually more complex including backchannel (BC) responses 1 from the listeners, i.e. signals of acknowledgment like uh-huh, or a particular reaction, e.g. oh, jeez!, to what the speaker just uttered [1]. ...
... The term backchannel was coined by Yngve [2], who divides the dialog into frontchannel and backchannel; the former corresponds to the channel of the interlocutor who currently has the floor, and the latter is the channel that does not. BC responses, made by the listeners, do not occur in separate turns, but during the speaker's turn [1]. Non-verbal BCs also exist like nodding, gestures, smiling [3,4,5], however, this type of BCs are out of our research scope. ...
... Different theories have been developed to explain humanhuman dialog interaction and they approach BC responses differently. Tolins and Fox [6] cluster backchanneling studies into two theory paradigms: 1 The terms backchannel and backchannel responses are used indistinctly. ...
This paper presents our latest investigation on modeling backchannel in conversations. Motivated by a proactive backchanneling theory, we aim at developing a system which acts as a proactive listener by inserting backchannels, such as continuers and assessment, to influence speakers. Our model takes into account not only lexical and acoustic cues, but also introduces the simple and novel idea of using listener embeddings to mimic different backchanneling behaviours. Our experimental results on the Switchboard benchmark dataset reveal that acoustic cues are more important than lexical cues in this task and their combination with listener embeddings works best on both, manual transcriptions and automatically generated transcriptions.
... Typically, joint activities involve pursuing at least partially shared goals or purposes and therefore require the interlocutors to coordinate their individual actions in order to reach the goal (Clark, 2006). Furthermore, joint activities comprise several smaller nested joint projects, all containing separate sub-goals, which the involved participants jointly need to complete or progress through in pursuing the overarching goal of the activity (Bangerter & Clark, 2003;Knutsen, Ros, & Le Bigot, 2018). Again, taking the use of tablet computers as a case in point, the larger joint activity comprises numerous joint projects such as using specific applications, and even sub-projects where the participants are advancing within the applications by, for example, browsing through images, typing on the keyboard, and selecting what videos to watch from a streaming service. ...
A bourgeoning number of studies have demonstrated that people living with dementia are capable of participating in a wide range of everyday activities when supported by care professionals or family carers. However, little remains known about the situated practices used by carers to support people living with dementia as active co-participants in novel joint activities. Taking the use of tablet computers as an example, this study focuses on the interactional organization of instructions in joint activities involving people living with dementia, who have no previous experiences of touchscreen technologies, and their carers. The study is based on forty-one video recordings of ten dyads, each comprising a person living with dementia and a carer, as they are using tablet computers with applications suited to individual interests. Drawing on multimodal interaction analysis, we show how the carers continually foster the accomplishment of their interlocutors, and rarely take over responsibility for closing an ongoing joint project themselves. Our findings suggest that the carers' instructions, realized as verbal and embodied directives, function as a form of scaffolding practice that facilitates the coordination of visual perception and embodied conduct for the participants living with dementia.
