Dialogues are not just arbitrary sequences of utterances, not even if we disregard the fact that in spoken dialogues often more than one participant at the time is speaking. Put differently, not every sequence of utterances is a dialogue. This observation may remind us of the situation at the level of words and sentences, where not every sequence of words forms a sentence. This analogy has inspired the idea that it may be possible to devise Dialogue Grammars. Such grammars would be particularly useful for building dialogue systems. The idea that dialogues can be described by dialogue grammars has been contested by Good (1989) and Bunt (1988), and it has recently been defended by Taylor (1991). Maybe the analogy between a dialogue as a sequence of utterances and a sentence as a sequence of words is, on second thoughts, not so convincing.
Cite as: Bunt, H. (1991) Dynamic interpretation and dialogue performance. Proc. 2nd VENACO Workshop - The Structure of Multimodal Dialogue, 3-6
@inproceedings{bunt91_smmd,
author={Harry Bunt},
title={{Dynamic interpretation and dialogue performance}},
year=1991,
booktitle={Proc. 2nd VENACO Workshop - The Structure of Multimodal Dialogue},
pages={3--6}
}