Incrementality, Alignment and Shared Utterances

This paper describes an implemented prototype dialogue model within the Dynamic Syntax (DS) framework (Kempson et al., 2001) which directly reflects dialogue phenomena such as alignment, routinization and shared utterances. In DS, word-by-word incremental parsing and generation are defined in terms of actions on semantic tree structures. This paper proposes a model of dialogue context which includes these trees and their associated actions, and shows how alignment and routinization result directly from minimisation of lexicon search (and hence speaker's effort), and how switch of speaker/hearer roles in shared utterances can be seen as a switch between incremental processes directed by different goals, but sharing the same (partial) data structures.Article