For people to contribute to discourse, they must do more than utter the right sentence at the right time. The basic requirement is that they odd to their common ground in on orderly way. To do this, we argue, they try to establish for each utterance the mutual belief that the addressees hove understood what the speaker meant well enough for current purposes. This is accomplished by the collective actions of the current contributor and his or her partners, and these result in units of conversation called contributions. We present a model of contributions and show how it accounts for o variety of features of everyday conversations.

Conversation between two people is usually of MIXED-INITIATIVE, with CONTROL over the conversation being transferred from one person to another. We apply a set of rules for the transfer of control to 4 sets of dialogues consisting of a total of 1862 turns. The application of the control rules lets us derive domain-independent discourse structures. The derived structures indicate that initiative plays a role in the structuring of discourse. In order to explore the relationship of control and initiative to discourse processes like centering, we analyze the distribution of four different classes of anaphora for two data sets. This distribution indicates that some control segments are hierarchically related to others. The analysis suggests that discourse participants often mutually agree to a change of topic. We also compared initiative in Task Oriented and Advice Giving dialogues and found that both allocation of control and the manner in which control is transferred is radically different for the two dialogue types. These differences can be explained in terms of collaborative planning principles.

Eleven PC-owning families were interviewed at home about their use of conventional and digital photos. They also completed photo diaries and recorded photo-sharing conversations that occurred spontaneously over a three month period after the in-home interviews. From an analysis of the resulting materials we illustrate the strengths and weaknesses of past and present technology for photo sharing. These allow us to prioritise user requirements for a range of future photo-sharing technologies or ‘photoware’.

This paper surveys and evaluates some techniques for eliciting requirements of computer-based systems, paying particular attention to how they deal with social issues. The methods surveyed include introspection, interviews, questionnaires, and protocol, conversation, interaction, and discourse analyses. Although they are relatively untried in Requirements Engineering, we believe there is much promise in the last three techniques, which grew out of ethnomethodology and sociolinguistics. In particular, they can elicit tacit knowledge by observing actual interactions in the workplace, and can also be applied to the system development process itself.

This paper re-assesses the role of real-time video as a technology to support interpersonal communications at distance. We review three distinct hypotheses about the role of video in the co-ordination of conversational content and process. For each hypothesis, we identify design implications and outstanding research questions derived from current findings. We first evaluate the non-verbal communication hypothesis, namely the prevailing assumption that the role of video is to supplement speech, and embodied in applications such as videoconferencing and videophone. We conclude that previous work has overestimated the importance of video at the expense of audio. This finding has strong implications for the implementation of such systems, and we make recommendations about both synchronisation and bandwidth allocation. Furthermore our own recent studies of workplace interactions point to other communicative functions of video. Current systems have neglected another potentially vital role of...

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We describe our experience in developing a discourse-annotated corpus for community-wide use. Working in

When on the move, cognitive resources are reserved partly for passively monitoring and reacting to contexts and events, and partly for actively constructing them. The Resource Competition Framework (RCF), building on the Multiple Resources Theory, explains how psychosocial tasks typical of mobile situations compete for cognitive resources and then suggests that this leads to the depletion of resources for task interaction and eventually results in the breakdown of fluent interaction. RCF predictions were tested in a semi-naturalistic field study measuring attention during the performance of assigned Web search tasks on mobile phone while moving through nine varied but typical urban situations. Notably, we discovered up to eight-fold differentials between micro-level measurements of attentional resource fragmentation, for example from spans of over 16 seconds in a laboratory condition dropping to bursts of just a few seconds in difficult mobile situations. By calibrating perceptual sampling, reducing resource usage for tasks of secondary importance, and resisting the impulse to switch tasks before finalization, participants compensated for the resource depletion. The findings are compared to previous studies in office contexts. The work is valuable in many areas of HCI dealing with mobility. ACM Classification Keywords: H5.m. Information interfaces and presentation (e.g., HCI): Miscellaneous

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This chapter analyzes why computers and telecommunications have not created computcr-mediated work environments for collaboration that are as successful as physically shared environments. Our goals are, first, to identify the mechanisms by which proxin~ity makes cnl-laboration easier, concentrating on the way it facilitates interpersollal interaction and aware-ness; and second, to evaluate how current computer-mediated communication technologies provide or fail to provide the key benefits of proximity. We use a decompositional frame-work that examines how visibility, copresence, mobility, cotemporalitv and other affordances of media affect the important collaborative tasks of initiating conversation, establishing common ground, and maintaining awareness of potentially relevant changcs in the collabo-rative environment. Increasingly, collaborating with other people is as likely to take place over distance or time as it is face-to-face. An abundance of new communication technologies has been dcvcloped to mediate remote collaboration: e-mail, bulletin boards, instant messaging, document sharing, videoconferencing, awareness services, and others. Yet collaboration at a distance remains substantially harder to accomplish than