Modeling the Rhetoric of Human-Computer Interaction

The emergence of potential new human-computer interaction styles enabled through technological advancements in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and computational linguistics makes it increasingly more important to formalize and evaluate these innovative approaches. In this position paper, we propose a multi-dimensional conversation analysis framework as a way to expose and quantify the structure of a variety of new forms of human-computer interaction. We argue that by leveraging sociolinguistic constructs referred to as authoritativeness and heteroglossia, we can expose aspects of novel interaction paradigms that must be evaluated in light of usability heuristics so that we can approach the future of human-computer interaction in a way that preserves the usability standards that have shaped the state-of-the-art that is tried and true.