Conversational Coherency

A major goal of this work is to specify some steps of the process by which participants maintain coherency in their conversations. The underlying element of the analysis is a construct called a 'context space'. Roughly, a group of utterances that refers to a single issue or episode forms the basis for a context space. Superficially a conversation is a sequence of utterances; at a deeper level it is a structured entity whose utterances can be parsed into hierarchically related context spaces. As a conversation proceeds, each conversant is building up a model of the conversation. Such a model includes the conversation's context space structure, a notion of the present discourse topic, and a list of items being focused upon. An important factor upon which the smoothness and coherency of a conversation depends is the lack of conflict between the respective models of the participants. Conflicts are prevented by a speaker following a number of high level syntactic and semantic relational rules that enable listeners to identify the speaker's discourse model. These rules are given in the paper, and, as the reader shall see, they are highly integrated with the view of conversation presented here -a hierarchy of related context spaces. Reichman Conversational Coherency