<?xml version="1.0" standalone="yes"?>
<Paper uid="P88-1015">
  <Title>Cues and control in Expert-Client Dialogues</Title>
  <Section position="6" start_page="128" end_page="129" type="concl">
    <SectionTitle>
5 Conclusions
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> The main result of this exploratory study is the finding that control is a useful parameter for identifying discourse structure. Using this parameter we identified three levels of structure in the dialogues: (a) control phases; (b) topic; and (c) global organisation. For the control phases, we found that three types of uttermaces (prompts, repetitions and summaries) were consistently used to signal control shifts.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> For the low level structures we identified, (i.e.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> control phases), cue words and phrases were not as reliable in predicting shifts. This result challenges the claims of recent discourse theories (5, 10) which argue for a the close relation between cue words and discourse structure. We also examined how utterance type related to topic shift and found that few interruptions introduced a new topic. Finally there was evidence for high level structures in these dialogues as evidenced by topic initiation and  control, with early topics being initiated and dominated by the client and the opposite being true for the later parts.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> Another focus of current research has been \[3\] the modelling of speaker and listener goals (1, 3) but there has been little research on real dialogues investigating how goals are communicated and inferred. This study identifies surface linguistic phenomena which reflect the \[4\] fact that participants are continuously monitoring their goals. When plans are perceived as succeeding, participants use explicit cues such as prompts, repetitions and summaries \[5\] to signal their readiness to move to the next stage of the plan. In other cases, where participants perceive obstacles to their goals being achieved, they resort to interruptions and we have tried to make explicit the rules by which \[6\] they do this.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> In addition our methodology is different from other studies because we have attempted to provide an explanation for whole dialogues rather than fragments of dialogues, and used explicit criteria in a bottom-up manner to \[7\] identify discourse structures. The number of dialogues was small and taken from a single problem domain. It seems likely therefore that some of our findings (e.g the central shift) will be specific to the diagnostic dialogues we studied. Further research applying the same tech- \[8\] niques to a broader set of data should establish the generality of the control rules suggested here.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
class="xml-element"></Paper>