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<Paper uid="P94-1014">
  <Title>AN EMPIRICAL MODEL OF ACKNOWLEDGMENT FOR SPOKEN-LANGUAGE SYSTEMS</Title>
  <Section position="4" start_page="0" end_page="96" type="relat">
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2 RELATED WORK
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    <Paragraph position="0"> Clark and Schaefer (1989) suggested that acknowledgments are an important component of a larger framework through which communicating parties provide evidence of understanding. Conversants have a range of means, which vary with respect to strength, for indicating acceptance of a presentation. These include continued attention, initiation of the next relevant contribution, acknowledgment, demonstration, and display.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Thus acknowledgments are common linguistic devices used to provide feedback. Broadly speaking, acknowledgments are responsive acts. 1 That is, they are usually uttered in (possibly partial) response to a production by another speaker; acknowledgment acts express beliefs and intentions of one conversant with respect to the mutuality of prior exchanges involving some other conversant.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> The intended perlocutionary effect of an acknowledgment act is generally the perception of mutuality of some belief.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3">  In previous research, the function of acknowledgments has been most readily characterized in terms of attention, understanding and acceptance on the recipient's behalf (Kendon, 1967; Schegloff, 1982). In addition, it has been suggested that they serve to facilitate active participation in dialogues and promote &amp;quot;smooth&amp;quot; conversations (Duncan and Fiske, 1987).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> Schegloff (1982) described two main types of acknowledgment: continuers and assessments.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5"> Continuers, such as &amp;quot;uh huh,&amp;quot; &amp;quot;quite,&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;I see,&amp;quot; act as bridges between units. Conversants use acknowledgments as continuers to signal continued attention and to display the recipient's understanding that the speaker is in an extended turn that is not yet complete. Moreover, continuers indicate the turning down of an opportunity to undertake a repair subdialogue regarding the previous utterance or to initiate a new turn. Assessments--such as &amp;quot;oh wow&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;gosh, really?&amp;quot;-- are essentially an elaboration on continuers. That is, they occur in much the same environment and have similar properties to continuers, but in addition express a brief assessment of the previous utterance.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="6"> Empirical analysis of conversations has indicated that the occurrence of acknowledgments is not arbitrary. Acknowledgments mostly occur at or near major grammatical boundaries, which serve as transition-relevance places for turn-taking (Sacks et al., 1974; Hopper, 1992). In particular, work by Orestrom (1983) and Goodwin (1986) suggested a tendency for continuers to overlap with the primary speaker's contribution, in such a way that they serve as bridges between two turnconstructional units. Assessments, on the other hand, are generally engineered without overlap.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="7"> Goodwin suggested that conversants make special efforts to prevent assessments from intruding into subsequent units. That is, the speaker typically delays production of the subsequent unit until the recipient 's assessment has been brought to completion. null Clearly, acknowledgments are an important device for providing evidence of understanding and for avoiding miscommunication between parties.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="8"> Just as next-relevant-contributions include the entire range of potential task or domain actions, the task-based role of acknowledgments can be differentiated within their class as acceptances. Beyond continuers and assessments, we will demonstrate that acknowledgments incorporate a larger set of conversational actions, many of which relate to coherence of multi-utterance contributions.</Paragraph>
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