Coordination and Feedback: Roles of interjectory utterances in spoken Japanese discourse

We report an empirical study on interjectory responses, utterances such as hai, ee, and un, corresponding roughly to 'yes' or '11h-huh' in English, with special emphasis on the way they help coordinate, and enhance mutual understanding in, dialogue. A corpus of data has been collected from telephone conversations, as well as from radio and television programs. Our analysis demonstrates that these expressions should be interpreted in a highly context dependent manner and that their use involves a complex coordination mechanism that encompasses different hierarchical levels of coordination. We also discuss the way in which appropriate analysis of these interjectory responses is relevant for natural language understanding and speech act recognition.