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<Paper uid="W04-2308">
  <Title>Other-Initiated Self-Repairs in Estonian Information Dialogues: Solving Communication Problems in Cooperation</Title>
  <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Our goal is to build a dialogue system that would be able to interact with humans in Estonian using norms and rules of human-human communication. Human-human communication is not fluent, problems that must be solved arise continuously. Similar problems occur in human-computer interaction.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Several branches of linguistics study how to solve communication problems: discourse analysis, psycholinguistics, foreign language learning, conversation analysis, dialogue modelling on the computer and determining dialogue acts (Allen, Core, 1997; Linell, 1998; Bunt, 1999; Traum, 1999; Allwood et al. 2001; O'Brien, 2002). Similar phenomena are called differently: structure shifts, feedback, grounding, repair, communication strategies. There are at least the following difficulties with these treatments: 1) repair is considered together with other dialogue management acts and not as a separate phenomenon as it is in natural conversation 2) different means of repair are considered instead of repair as a process and sequence 3) non-natural utterances are used in dialogue systems for repairs (To Paris, is that correct? / I don't quite understand ) To overcome these problems, we analyse repair using the methods of the conversation analysis (Schegloff et al 1977). There are 4 kinds of repairs differenced in CA: self-initiated self-repair, other-initiated self-repair, self-initiated other-repair, other-initiated other-repair. All the repairs analyzed in this paper are other-initiated self-repairs. We differentiate three subtypes here: clarification (45 cases), non-understanding (7), and reformulation (27).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> We have analyzed calls for information (asking phone numbers, addresses etc.), and calls to travel bureaus, shops and outpatients' departments. The analysed sub-corpus consists of 62 dialogues; 2472 dialogue act tags were used in our sub-corpus, among them 79 repair initiations (about dialogue acts see Hennoste et al 2003).</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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