The effect of familiarity in knowledge synchronisation

Sequences of dialogue acts occur in conversational dialogues, for example explanations are normally followed by acknowledgements, and queries are usually followed by responses. In a co-operative goal-directed dialogue, these patterns of moves can be seen to represent the synchronisation of knowledge, indicating how participants maintain mental maps of their own knowledge and that of their partner. However, these sequences may be influenced by the familiarity of participants, for instance when sufficient communicative conventions have been established between participants to omit acknowledgements to previous dialogue acts through nonverbal signals or implicit communicative patterns. This paper sets out to determine whether a correlation between dialogue acts and familiarity exists by investigating the distribution of dialogue acts in transcripts of goal-directed dialogues where participants are either familiar or unfamiliar with each other. Any correlation may then provide opportunities for an automated mind-minding agent to identify and simulate familiarity when interacting with a human mind-minding agent.