Theories of conversation for conversational IR
- Paul Thomas ,
- Mary Czerwinski ,
- Daniel McDuff ,
- Nick Craswell
International Workshop on Conversational Approaches to Information Retrieval |
An extended version of this paper also appears as Thomas et al., ACM Trans. Info. Sys. 39(2), 2021: https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3439869.
Conversational information retrieval is a relatively new and fast-developing research area, but conversation itself has been well-studied for decades. Researchers have analysed linguistic phenomena such as structure and semantics but also para-linguistic features
such as tone, body language and even the physiological states of interlocutors. We tend to treat computers as social agents — especially if they have some human-like features in their design — and so work from human-to-human conversation is highly relevant to how we
think about the design of human-to-computer applications. In this position paper, we summarise some salient past work, focusing on social norms; structures; and affect, prosody and style. We also discuss some implications for research and design of conversational IR systems.