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<Paper uid="P88-1015">
  <Title>Cues and control in Expert-Client Dialogues</Title>
  <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="123" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> A number of researchers have shown that there is organisation in discourse above the level of the individual utterance (5, 8, 9, 10), The current exploratory study uses control as a parameter for identifying these higher level structures. We then go on to address how conversational participants co-ordinate moves between these higher level units, in particular looking at the ways they use to signal the beginning and end of such high level units.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Previous research has identified three means by which speakers signal information about discourse structure to listeners: Cue words and phrases (5, 10); Intonation (7); Pronominalisation (6, 2). In the cue words approach, Reichman'(10) has claimed that phrases like &amp;quot;because&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;so&amp;quot;, and &amp;quot;but&amp;quot; offer explicit information to listeners about how the speaker's current contribution to the discourse relates to what has gone previously. For example a speaker might use the expression &amp;quot;so&amp;quot; to signal that s/he is about to conclude what s/he has just said. Grosz and Sidner (5) relate the use of such phrases to changes in attentional state.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> An example would be that &amp;quot;and&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;but&amp;quot; signal to the listener that a new topic and set of referents is being introduced whereas &amp;quot;anyway&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;in any case&amp;quot; indicate a return to a previous topic and referent set. A second indirect way of signalling discourse structure is intonation. Hirschberg and Pierrehumbert (7) showed that intonational contour is closely related to discourse segmentation with new topics being signalled by changes in intonational contour. A final more indirect cue to discourse structure is the speaker's choice of referring expressions and grammatical structure. A number of researchers (4, 2, 6, 10) have given accounts of how these relate to the continuing, retaining or shifting of focus.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> The above approaches have concentrated on particular surface linguistic phenomena and then investigated what a putative cue serves to signal in a number of dialogues. The problem  with this approach is that the cue may only be an infrequent indicator of a particular type of shift. If we want to construct a general theory of discourse than we want to know about the whole range of cues serving this function. This study therefore takes a different approach. We begin by identifying all shifts of control in the dialogue and then look at how each shift was signalled by the speakers. A second problem with previous research is that the criteria for identifying discourse structure are not always made explicit. In this study explicit criteria are given: we then go on to analyse the relation between cues and this structure.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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