ISCA Archive Interspeech 2004
ISCA Archive Interspeech 2004

Towards understanding mixed-initiative in task-oriented dialogues

Fan Yang, Peter A. Heeman, Kristy Hollingshead

Mixed-initiative in dialogue does not mean that either speaker is free to take the lead in the conversation at any time. Rather, who can show initiative, and when, is restricted. In this paper, we define initiative and control as two levels of dialogue phenomena, and give further evidence for our theory of restricted initiative that control belongs to the initiator of a discourse segment. We show that the initiator and the non-initiator play different roles in terms of showing initiative.