In this paper, we describe the influence of physical proximity on the development of collaborative relationships between scientific researchers and on the execution of their work. Our evidence is drawn from our own studies of scientific collaborators, as well as from observations of research and development activities collected by other investigators. These descriptions provide the foundation for a discussion of the actual and potential role of communications technology in professional work, especially for collaborations carried out at a distance.

In conversation speakers design their utterances to be understood against the common ground they share with their addressees-their common experience, expertise, dialect, and culture. That ordinarily gives addressees an advantage over overhearers in understanding. Addressees have an additional advantage, we pro-pose, because they can actively collaborate with speakers in reaching the mutual belief that they have understood what was said, whereas overhearers cannot. As evidence for the proposal, we looked at triples of people in which one person told another person in conversation how to arrange 12 complex figures while an over-hearer tried to arrange them too. All three began as strangers with the same background information. As predicted, addressees were more accurate at arrang-ing the figures than overhearers even when the overhearers heard every word. Other evidence suggests that the very process of understanding is different for addressees and overhearers. 8 1989 Acadermc Press, Inc. People understand each other in conversations by gathering evidence about each other’s intentions. How do they do that? The traditional view, which we will call the autonom&s view, is that they listen to the words uttered, decode them, and interpret them against what they take to be the common ground of the participants in the conversation (e.g., Anderson,

In conversation, two people inevitably know different amounts about the topic of discussion, yet to make their references understood, they need to draw on knowledge and beliefs that they share. An expert and a novice talking with each other, therefore, must assess each other's expertise and accommodate to their differences. They do this in part, it is proposed, by assessing, supplying, and acquiring expertise as they collaborate in completing their references. In a study of this accommodation, pairs of people who were or were not familiar with New York City were asked to work together to arrange pictures of New York City landmarks by talking about them. They were able to assess each other's level of expertise almost immediately and to adjust their choice of proper names, descriptions, and perspectives accordingly. In doing so, experts supplied, and novices acquired, specialized knowledge that made referring more efficient. For success in conversation, people must continually appeal to their common ground—their mutual knowledge, beliefs, and

This paper presents empirical results comparing spoken and keyboard communication. It is shown that speakers attempt to achieve more detailed goals in giving instructions than do users of keyboards. One specific kind of fine-grained communicative act, a request that the hearer identify the referent of a noun phrase, is shown to dominate spoken instruction-giving discourse, but is nearly absent from keyboard discourse. Most important, these requests are only achieved "indirectly". - through utterances whose surface forms do not explicitly convey the speakers' intent. A plan-based theory of communication is shown to uncover the speakers' intentions underlying many cases of indirect identification requests found in the corpus, once an action for referent identification has been posited. In so doing, the theory demonstrates how intent (or plan) recognition can be applied in reasoning about the use of a description. As a consequence of this approach, it is shown that the conditions on the planning of successful identification requests account for Searle's conditions on the act of referring. It is concluded that intent recognition will need to be a central focus for pragmatics/discourse components of future speech understanding systems, and that computational linguistics needs to develop formalisms for reasoning about speakers' use of descriptions

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cation as an integrated set of speech, gaze, and gestural behaviours. As we shall see, studies of mediated communication allow us to identify the contribution of different nonverbal behaviours, such as gaze and gesture to communication. They also help to clarify the overall influence of visual information in communication, and the effects of communication interactive processes such as feedback on communication. Prior to examining what research has to say about these issues, we describe: (a) mediated communication theories; (b) the technologies used to support communication in the various situations; (c) the methods used to study mediated communication. Theories of mediated communication There are many different theories of mediated communication. Rather than describing each in detail, we restrict ourselves here to an exposition of the general form that these theories take, and the general set of claims that they make. The fundamental goal of mediated communication theor

Listeners are often active in conversation, and the feedback they provide speakers can improve the communication. To examine how feedback influences conversation, we had 76 speaker subjects watch a movie and then summarize it to one or two listeners. The- listeners provided varying amounts of feedback to the speaker. When two listeners were present, one could influence the speaker through feedback and the other could only eavesdrop on the conversation. When speakers received more feedback, their narratives were more comprehensible; that is, both listeners understood the movie better. In addition, feedback individuated communication; that is, the listener who provided the feedback understood the movie better than the eavesdropper who listened to the same conversation. In part, feedback produced these effects by coordinating what the speaker said with what the listener needed to know. Listener feedback signaled listeners ' prior knowledge of the movie, and speakers talked most efficiently about those sections of the movie about which listeners had prior knowledge. Traditional research on communication has often proceeded as if the variables affecting it were static and nonemergent, in the sense that most variables do not change during the course of the conversation and that changes that do occur are produced by something other than dynamic interaction between the participants. For example, work on attitude change has studied static characteristics of the source, message, and recipient (McGuire, 1969). Work in nonverbal communication, with a few notable exceptions (e.g., Goffman, 1971), also typically focuses on these characteristics by looking at personality differences (e.g., Rosenthal, Hall,

this paper, we examine the strategies managerial teams use to achieve coordination and the effects of coordination on team performance. We hypothesized that four coordination strategies---frequent communication, evenly distributed communication, shared cognitions about members' expertise, and team history---would lead to greater team coordination. We also hypothesized that there would be tradeoffs between several of these strategies. Greater coordination was expected to lead to better performance outcomes, regardless of the strategies a team used to achieve it. We examined our hypotheses within the context of a 14-week realistic management simulation. Coordination was influenced by evenness of communication, shared cognitions about the distribution of expertise within the team, and time working together. Coordination was also influenced by interactions between shared cognitions and frequency of communication, and between shared cognitions and team history. Contrary to our predictions, however, there was neither a main effect of communication frequency on coordination, nor an interaction of communication frequency with history working together. The level of coordination within a team was directly related to three of four outcome measures. Coordination in Teams: Evidence from Simulated Management Teams Groups are inherently different from individuals performing the same task because of a need to coordinate. Whenever the work of individuals is interdependent, they must coordinate to achieve success (Van de Ven, 1976). Malone and Crowston (1994) defined coordination as the extra work organizations and individuals must complete when individuals are working in concert to accomplish some goal, over and above what they would need to do to accomplish the goal individually. To w...

We show that participants in conversation develop beliefs about shared information that others do not. So-called directors talked with two partners in succession (A and B) to arrange unusual figures. Directors went from long, indefinite descriptions of the figures to short, definite references as common ground was built up with A. When B had been a silent side participant in the fast conversation, directors continued to use short references when they changed partners. References became less efftcient when B had not been a participant-even when B had heard the first conversation and seen the figures. When B had only heard the fast conversation, he or she was treated much the same as a completely naive partner. Apparently, conversation provides preferred evidence for coordinating beliefs about shared information. o 1992 ACZ&~~C press, IN. In conversation, speakers collaborate with their partners in making references. In an earlier paper (Clark BL Wilkes-Gibbs, 1986), we proposed that when a speaker wants to refer to an object, it is not enough for her to utter a noun phrase such as the Allen wrench. She and her partner are also responsible for establishing that he has understood her as intended. What they do, therefore, is try to reach the mutual belief that he has understood her reference well enough for current purposes. They collaborate to reach this belief; she looks for reliable evidence of his understanding and he tries to provide it. In the process, he may offer alternative phrasing and ask for repeats or repairs (you mean the small metal thing shaped like an L?); she may offer more information and ask for confirmation. Predictions of the collaborative theory, as we will call it, have been confirmed for repeated references to objects (Clark & Wilkes-Gibbs, 1986), for partners with disparate goals (Wilkes-Gibbs, 1986), and dis-Send correspondence and reprint requests to D.

Restrictions of interactivity in dialogue are often seen as having negative impact on the efficiency of the dialogue, as they affect the ability to give immediate feedback (Whittaker, 2003). We have conducted experiments with one such restriction common in spoken dialogue systems, namely push-totalk. While our results confirm many predictions from the literature (fewer but longer turns; reduction of positive feedback), we found no significant impact on task-efficiency. Our analysis of the grounding strategies of the subjects shows that the restriction actually induced a more cautious strategy that proved advantageous for our matching task, and that giving negative feedback in the form of clarification requests was not affected by the restriction. 1