Dialogue Macrogame Theory

Dialogue Macrogame Theory is designed to enable analysis of particular natural dialogues. Some dialogues can be analyzed with DMT; some cannot. Where it fits, DMT gives a partial technical characterization of the classes of dialogues represented in the analyses. This paper is focused on presenting the elements of the theory. Other presentations are expected to describe its application and validation. This paper introduces Dialogue Macrogame Theory, a method for describing the organization of certain kinds of dialogues. Dialogue Macrogame Theory (DMT) is a successor to a theory sometimes called Dialogue Game Theory, developed in the 1970s and 1980s at USCInformation Sciences Institute (ISI). DMT is able to describe substantially more dialogues than its predecessor, and it identifies kinds of mechanisms not included in the predecessor. DMT is a step toward accounting for the coherence of entire dialogues. In the late 1970s a research team at USCInformation Sciences Institute (ISI) studied natural dialogues with particular interest in applying the results to human-computer interaction. The team produced a series of reports (Mann 1979) (Mann, Carlisle et al. 1977) (Mann, Carlisle et al. 1975), a published paper by Levin and Moore (Levin and Moore 1977) and later another paper, entitled Dialogue Games: Conventions of Human Interaction (Mann 1988). These publications arose out of the study of many natural dialogues. The final theoretical summary was presented in the form of a technical method for representing the short range and long range dialogue structures. Recent work has attempted to apply this set of structures to additional dialogues. This effort has identified a number of deficiencies of the framework, which have led to making a fresh start rather than adjustment. The major structures in DMT are based on intentions which are imputed to dialogue participants. The focus of this paper is on mechanisms. Dialogue Macrogames are defined. Another class of mechanisms, called Unilaterals, is also described.