Conversational patterns for human-machine interaction
Schegloff mapped conversational patterns for human-human interaction. We need new ones for human-machine interaction, and conflating the two harms both.
Human conversation has conversational patterns: Schegloff (Sacks, Schegloff & Jefferson, 1974). But those are for human-human conversation.
If we do want to use conversation as an interaction model (which I think should still be possible, just not unrestrained), we should not reuse human-human conversational patterns, but design new ones for this particular context: human-machine interaction. And that might (should!) include patterns that include more constrained inputs and different interactions than what we see in human-human conversation. That’s the entire point: conflating human-human conversation with human-machine interaction harms both.
Research question: has the premise that conversation leads to better results in chatbots ever been researched?
Sources:
- Sacks, H., Schegloff, E.A. & Jefferson, G. (1974). A simplest systematics for the organisation of turn-taking for conversation. Language, 50(4), 696-735.
- Schegloff, E.A. (2007). Sequence Organization in Interaction: A Primer in Conversation Analysis. Cambridge University Press.