Route Communication in Dialogue: a Matter of Principles
Theodora Koulouri, Stanislao Lauria · 2010
The present study uses the dialogue paradigm to explore route communication. It revolves around the analysis of a corpus of route instructions produced in real-time interaction with the follower. It explores the variation in forming route instructions and the factors that contribute in it. The results show that visual co-presence influences the performance, conversation patterns and configuration of instructions. Most importantly, the results suggest an analogy between the choices of instructiongivers and the communicative actions of their partners. 1.1 Spatial language in dialogue The main question this paper attempts to address is how people produce route instructions in dialogue. The current zeitgeist in language research and dialogue system development seems to be the unified investigation of spatial language and dialogue (Coventry et al., 2009). Indicative of the growing prioritisation of dialogue in the study of spatial language are the on-going research efforts within the MapTask 1 project and the GIVE challenge 2. 1.2 A framework for the analysis of route instructions The study uses CORK (Communication of Route Knowledge, (Allen 2000)), a framework which provides a component-based analysis of route instructions. The CORK taxonomy differentiates between instructions that are directives (action statements with verbs of movement) and descriptive statements (with state-of-being verbs, like “be ” and “see”). Descriptives present a static pic-