Stressing a sociological approach based on conversational analysis, the authors analyze data from the SUNDIAL project, a European Commission funded project on speech understanding, in order to show how computers and people organize dialogue. They describe the "Wizard of Oz" method of collecting spoken dialogues, which monitors people who believe they are interacting with a speech understanding system before that system has been fully designed or built, and show how the resulting dialogues may be analyzed to guide further design. The book provides detailed and comparative empirical studies of human-human and human- computer speech, including analyses of opening and closing sequences, turn-taking, and the organization of overlap and repair strategies to overcome troubles in verbal interaction. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.
Using data taken from a major European Union funded project on speech understanding, the SunDial project, this book considers current perspectives on human computer interaction and argues for the value of an approach taken from sociology which is based on conversation analysis.
