Negative feedback in information dialogues: identification, classification and problem-solving procedures

This research-essentially empirical and of a linguistic nature-takes as its departure point the notion of feedback and the analysis of feedback phenomena in French informative dialogues. Our main concern has been to try to map the theoretical models of dialogue control with the empirical reality of, dialogue problems. Supported by the statement of Bunt (1995a) that "understanding dialogue behaviour is central to a theory of dialogue", our research attempts to arrive at a better understanding of dialogue difficulties and reflects on how to construct an acceptable dialogue model adjusted in the best possible way to this complex reality. There is also a certain comparative perspective as we have been considering different kinds of dialogue data at different stages from human-human dialogues to human-machine dialogues. Our contribution will focus on three aspects: 1. A proposal for the classification of 238 difficulties found in 117 man-man and 146 man-machine dialogues. 2. An analysis of the linguistic "dialogue problem" devices found in the corpus as well as their interpretation. 3. A tentative redefinition of feedback as a dynamic dialogue control mechanism which tries to recognize, correct and avoid dialogue problems. (C) 1998 Academic Press Limited.