Theories of Conversation for Conversational IR

Conversational information retrieval is a relatively new and fast-developing research area, but conversation itself has been well studied for decades. Researchers have analysed linguistic phenomena such as structure and semantics but also paralinguistic features such as tone, body language, and even the physiological states of interlocutors. We tend to treat computers as social agents—especially if they have some humanlike features in their design—and so work from human-to-human conversation is highly relevant to how we think about the design of human-to-computer applications. In this article, we summarise some salient past work, focusing on social norms; structures; and affect, prosody, and style. We examine social communication theories briefly as a review to see what we have learned about how humans interact with each other and how that might pertain to agents and robots. We also discuss some implications for research and design of conversational IR systems.