Kerstin Fischer:
Discourse Conditions for Spatial Perspective
Taking
Abstract
This paper addresses which reference systems speakers employ in verbal human-robot
interaction, under which conditions they employ them, and to what extent
speakers stick to one system once they have started to use it. The method
is to compare human-robot dialogues that differ only with respect to a single
variable, namely the robot's linguistic output. The conversation analytic
and corpus analyses show that speakers take path-based descriptions from
the partner's perspective to be useful because they are fail-safe, yet they
involve constant attention of the speaker; object-naming strategies from
the partner's perspective are taken to be most efficient; external relations,
such as 'go north', may be used because the artificial communication partner,
the robot, seems to be particularly good at it, even though the speaker herself
may not be; and egocentric descriptions are easy for the speaker but are
believed to be too difficult for the robot.
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