Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

A structural model of discourse for natural language interaction developed for the LINLIN-system is evaluated using the Wizard-of-Oz method. 21 dialogues were collected using five different background systems, making it possible to vary the type and number of tasks possible to perform by the users. The results indicate that the structural complexity of the discourse in man-machine dialogues is simpler than most human dialogues, at least for information retrieval and some types of ordering systems, suggesting that computationally simpler discourse models can be used in these domains.