Are Grounding moves related to sentence complexity?
Speaker:Martin Tietze
Institution: University of Edinburgh
Abstract:
In dialogue, several classes of dialogue acts can be distinguished. The most prominent are core speech acts (CSA) and grounding speech acts (GSA). While CSAs actually drive the dialogue by introducing task-related information, GSAs are used to by dialogue participants to assure mutual understanding. For a successful dialogue, understanding must be achieved at the level of mutual acceptance of the propositions introduced by the CSA which presupposes understanding at the underlying levels of hearing, identification and interpretation. Depending on the dialogue setting verbal GSAs make up a substantial part of a dialogue (we do not cover non-verbal SAs here). In the present work, the hypothesis is tested wether the occurrence of GSAs is depending on the sentence complexity of the preceding CSA. Sentence complexity is measured in terms of integration costs which are associated with obligatory syntactic requirements of the sentence containing the CSA. The analysis is performed on the HCRC MAP Task Corpus.