Structuring collaborative information-seeking dialogues

Conversational approaches to human-computer collaboration have so far mostly been employed for the design of natural language interfaces. We claim, however, that our “conversational interaction model” can also be applied feasibly to graphical and multimodal interactions. The model comprises two interrelated parts: first, the description of local discourse structures and functional interrelations between dialogue acts to capture (local) conversational tactics; second, the description of global structures by so-called “dialogue scripts” which are related to (global) information-seeking strategies. The application of the model in a multimedia information retrieval system is described in the conclusion of the paper.