Different Games in Dialogue: Combining character and conversational types in strategic choice Alafate Abulmiti Universite´ de Paris, CNRS Laboratoire de Linguistique Formelle
[email protected] Abstract We seek to develop an approach to strategic choice applicable to the general case of dialogical In this paper, we show that investigating the in- interaction, where termination is an important con- teraction of conversational type (often known sideration and where assessment is internal to the as language game or speech genre) with the character types of the interlocutors is worth- participants. Strategic choice is modelled by com- while. We present a method of calculating the bining structure from conversational types with psy- decision making process for selecting dialogue chological and cognitive notions associated with moves that combines character type and con- the players. versational type. We also present a mathemat- Character type as a relatively independent factor ical model that illustrate these factors’ interac- abstracted out of the conversational type is impor- tions in a quantitative way. tant for dialogue. Although there is some analy- 1 Introduction sis concerning both character effects and conversa- tional types in the dialogue, combining them and Wittgenstein(1953); Bakhtin(2010) introduced analyzing their interactions in a quantitative way language games/speech genres as notions tying di- has not, to our knowledge, been carried out before. versity of linguistic behaviors to activity. Build- The purposes of this paper is, hence, to combine ing on this, and insights of pragmaticists such as character type effect and conversational type anal- Hymes(1974); Allwood(2000), and earlier work ysis to yield a method that could help to analyse in AI by (Allen and Perrault, 1980; Cohen and strategic choice in dialogue.