The obligations and common ground structure of practical dialogues

In this paper a theory of dialogue structure of task oriented conversations and its associated tagging scheme are presented. The theory introduces two linguistic structures supporting the dialogue that, following traditional terminology, we call the obligations and common ground. The theory is illustrated with the detailed analysis of a transaction. We also describe the empirical work supporting the theory, as well as an evaluation task. The paper is concluded with a reflection on the relation of the present theory to traditional notions of obligations and grounding, its relation to a more general theory of discourse and conversation and its potential application to the construction of spoken natural language systems.