Accounting for Communication: Estimating Effort, Transparency, and Coherence

The position advanced in this paper is that the effective application of psycholinguistic models and techniques to the design of collaborative systems requires a more detailed analysis of the processes of repair. Although the analysis of communication is critical to understanding and supporting cooperative activity, the successful application of psycholinguistic approaches is restricted by some methodological and theoretical problems. It is proposed that progress can be made on these problems by developing a systematic, reliable analysis of repair. In support of this, metrics of collaborative effort, communicative transparency, and communicative coherence are proposed.