Understanding Dialogue: Language Use and Social Interaction

Martin J. Pickering and Simon Garrod
(爱丁堡大学 & University of Glasgow)

剑桥, England: 剑桥大学出版社, 2021, xvii+283 pp; 精装, 国际标准书号
978-1-108-47361-3; 平装, 国际标准书号 978-1-108-46193-1

Reviewed by
Rachel Bawden
Inria, 法国

Understanding Dialogue: Language Use and Social Interaction represents a departure from
classic theories in psycholinguistics and cognitive sciences; instead of taking as a start-
ing point the isolated speech of an individual that can be extended to accommodate
dialogue, a primary focus is put on developing a model adapted to dialogue itself,
bearing in mind important aspects of dialogue as an activity with a heavily coopera-
tive component. As a researcher of natural language processing with a background in
语言学, I ﬁnd highly intriguing the possibilities provided by the dialogue model
提出. Although the book does not itself touch upon the potential for automated
dialogue, I am inevitably writing this review from the point of view of a computational
linguist with these aspects in mind.

Building on numerous previous works, including many of the authors’ own studies
and theories, Understanding Dialogue presents the shared workspace framework, A
framework for understanding not just dialogue but cooperative activities in general, 的
which dialogue is viewed as a subtype. Based on Bratman’s (1992) concept of shared co-
operative activity, the framework provides a joint environment with which interlocutors
can interact, both by contributing to the space (with actions or utterances for example),
and by perceiving and processing their own or the other participants’ productions. 这
authors do not limit their work to linguistic communication: Many of their examples,
particularly at the beginning of the book, are non-linguistic (例如, hand shaking, dancing
a tango, playing singles tennis); others are primarily physical, but will most likely also
involve linguistic communication (such as jointly constructing ﬂat-pack furniture); 和
others are purely linguistic (例如, suggesting which restaurant to go to for lunch).

The notion of alignment is highly important to this framework both from a linguistic
and non-linguistic perspective, and is one of the main inspirations of the book, 拥有
previously been presented in Toward a Mechanistic Theory of Dialogue by the same au-
thors. As individuals interact via the joint space, alignment concerns the equivalence
in their representations at a conceptual level, with respect to their goals and relevant
props in the shared environment (dialogue model alignment) and linguistic representa-
tions shared in the workspace (linguistic alignment). Roughly speaking, in this second
(语言学的) 案件, this may for instance correspond to whether or not the individuals
have the same representation of the utterance in terms of phonetics (were the sounds
perceived correctly?) or in terms of lexical semantics (do they understand the same ref-
erence by the word uttered?). From here can be explained a number of different dialogue

https://doi.org/10.1162/coli r 00411

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计算语言学

体积 47, 数字 3

behaviors linked to the quest for alignment and the resolution of misalignment should
it occur.

The book is structured in four main parts, preceded by an Introduction presenting
the challenges of dialogue and the main ideas behind the framework. The focus of the
book is clearly stated from the beginning as being dialogue ﬁrst, in a rejection of models
that seek to study language primarily from a monologic point of view. As the authors
point out, the notion of alignment underpinning the framework involves by its very
nature multiple participants and therefore dialogic interactions must be studied in their
own right. I shall provide only a brief summary of the four parts here, highlighting
some components that in my view are key to the model, without however covering all
主题, which would require a far more extensive description.

Part I introduces the basis of the shared workspace framework as applied to activities
with a cooperative component and then speciﬁcally to dialogue. The basic sender-
receiver framework is quickly rejected, as it lacks the ability to represent certain key ele-
ments of cooperative activities, such as allowing for feedback and representing an
environment that is common to the participants. The shared workspace framework
is then introduced, along with the four important characteristics of cooperative joint
aspect systems that can be successfully illustrated with it: 结盟 (上文提到的),
模拟 (the representation of an activity without actually going through with it),
prediction (the anticipation of participants’ behaviors), and synchrony (concerning the
timing of behaviors in a joint activity), elements that are ﬁrst studied in the context of
joint activities in general (Chapter 3), before being reviewed speciﬁcally for dialogue
(Chapter 4).

Part II is dedicated to the aforementioned concept of alignment, fundamental to the
framework of cooperative activity. The chapters in this section look at the distinction be-
tween the different levels at which alignment can occur, the processes involved, 和
consequences of alignment, such as participants uttering similar linguistic productions.
Another important notion introduced in this part is that of the meta-representation of
结盟, which represents the participants’ belief about how aligned they are, 哪个
has inevitable consequences on how they then plan and implement their contributions.
Part III continues with the theme of alignment but turns to aspects involving the
efﬁciency of communication: succinctness of formulation (Chapter 8) and how we
time our contributions (Chapter 9). Particularly interesting is the role of commentaries,
which are contributions providing some sort of feedback on the alignment of partici-
pants and which can therefore affect the participants’ meta-representation of alignment.
There is an important distinction between positive and negative commentaries, 积极的
commentaries (such as “uh huh” in English) providing feedback that the speaker is
对齐, therefore enabling the participants to meta-represent alignment, and negative
那些 (such as “huh?”) indicating a misalignment, but then enabling the participants to
recover from that it. These commentaries contribute to the succinctness of dialogue and
to maximizing the efﬁciency of joint participation by indicating meta-alignment. 最后,
Chapter 9 discusses the notion of “speaking in good time,” related to the necessarily
sequential nature of dialogue and the importance of timing, including the effects of
different speech rates and the natural adaptation that occurs between interlocutors.

Part IV looks beyond the main theme of dialogue to other forms of conversation,
including multiparty conversations and collectives, exploring the possible roles of the
different participants, and how this relates back to alignment and their contribution to
the shared workspace. Also mentioned is monologue and the challenges that it poses
with respect to the primary and more natural form of language communication that is
dialogue. The ﬁnal chapter introduces how the shared workspace can be augmented

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Book Reviews

by adding props, 插图, and recordings and by using alternative communicative
工具, such as text messages and social media, which come with their own constraints
with respect to the access they allow to the shared workspace.

The description of the framework is thorough and well exempliﬁed, with a conti-
nuity in the use of examples throughout the book. A repetition and embellishment of
schemas helps to keep track of how the new additions from each chapter ﬁt into the
框架. I found some of the descriptions a little wordy, particularly because of the
reiteration of deﬁnitions and motivations, and in the minutely detailed illustration of
examples. 然而, from the point of view of pedagogy, this could be seen as adding
clarity, particularly for the reader who decides to focus on particular chapters rather
than reading the book from cover to cover. In my opinion, the book will be highly
accessible to all readers, even those who have limited background on the topic, 和
the authors take care to make it clear how their framework and deﬁnitions agree with
or differ from previous works.

为我, there remain two main areas that could have been worthy of further
exploration within the scope of this book. The ﬁrst is the effect of cultural and linguistic
差异. The authors do address the topic in Chapter 11, but in comparison with the
detail afforded to the description of the framework, this subject remains rather lacking,
with only a short section touching on it, under the the title of Social Norms and Joint
Planning. The authors cite an interesting study by Fujii (2012) on the differences between
American and Japanese speakers in terms of their use of language to foster alignment.
然而, this teaser does not lead on to a deeper discussion about cross-cultural
differences as explained in terms of the concepts used in this framework. 第二
topic is the link to sign languages, which would appear to link more than perfectly with
the shared workspace framework and yet is not mentioned by the authors.

There is little doubt that the framework is an important step in modeling dialogue
from a psycholinguistic perspective. As a researcher in natural language processing,
I would be excited to see the the possibilities for this framework in a computational
setting for automated dialogue, something that the authors mention in their conclusion.
They evoke the failure of current chatbots such as Siri and Alexa to effectively dialogue
due to their inability to provide commentary (例如, in the context of an ambiguous
问题) and to meta-represent alignment (IE。, have an opinion on whether the repre-
sentations of the dialogue participants are the same). They suggest that this framework
could help provide the solution to the current disruptions in communication we meet
when interacting with these systems. I therefore look forward to seeing what progress
can be made from this point of view.

参考
Bratman, 中号. 乙. 1992. Shared cooperative

活动. Philosophical Review,
101(2):327–340.

Fujii, 是. 2012. Differences of situating Self in
the place/ba of interaction between the
Japanese and American English speakers.
Journal of Pragmatics, 44:636–662.

Rachel Bawden is a researcher in natural language processing and a specialist in Machine Transla-
tion at Inria, 巴黎, 法国. She previously received a PhD in the Machine Translation of dialogue
from the LIMSI laboratory in Orsay, 法国, and spent two years as a postdoctoral researcher at
the University of Edinburgh working on the Machine Translation of low-resource languages. 她
interest in dialogue stems from her PhD work but also from her bachelor’s degree in linguistics
at the University of Oxford. Her e-mail address is rachel.bawden@inria.fr.

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