Principles of communicatively adequate man-machine interaction

Abstract

For the longest time computer systems have been modelled on the “informaton theoretic” view of communication characterized in Thomas 78 as follows: “Communication from system A to system B essentially involves the encoding of some internal state in system A into an external statement for transmission to system B. System B decodes the message and changes its internal state. Communication is considered “good” to the extent that there is an isomorphism between the internal states of the two systems after the message has been sent.” (p. 651). Recent advances in the design of expert and decision-support systems have brought about an increased awareness of the inadequacy of the encoding-decoding model for man-machine interaction. More appropriate is a functional model in which messages are passed in order to satisfy the goals of interaction. Thomas 78 proposes as an alternative, a game-theoretic model of communication. This paper argues that man-machine communication should be modelled on theories of human communication in natural language.Linguists and philosophers of language, in particular Searle 69 and Grice 75, have proposed functional theories of language use in which linguistic behaviour is characterized as a goal pursuing activity. This paper does not propose that natural language should be introduced as a universal vehicle for computer interaction but rather that the design of communicatively adequate computer systems should be modelled on the principles governing natural language use. The practice of modelling computer systems after paradigms of human cognitive behaviour has proved successful in other areas of computer science, in particular in computer vision. Research in natural language processing should hence not be viewed as a peripheral area in computer science merely aimed at providing the 'luxury' of allowing the casual user unrestricted means of interaction but as a prerequisite for the design of the next generation computer languages.