How attention is simulated and how positioning works in Besѣda®

Content

Research Issue

Let’s take the following interaction:

04 is the response to 01 even though it is at the end of the sequence. 02 - a condition to satisfy or deny the request for alcohol depending on the legal age seems to be unrelated to 01. How to represent these in Besѣda®?

Further still, there are occasions where there are retrospections (“flashbacks”) whereby the chronological order contradicts the sequential order (an utterance which was delivered later in the conversation is about an earlier chronology).

Because Besѣda® is a simulation of the complex process of talking, more generally, what have been concerning are the following two questions:

Design

Requirements

The feature should allow the communicator to determine which adjacency position s/he is intending to deliver.

The feature should allow the communicator to select which utterance they respond to.

The feature should allow the communicator to create a new topic which begins a new turn structure. The communicator should be able to create as many topics as needed.

Limitations

The system does not record and interpret the actual utterances and therefore some of the more common linguistic techniques (see the section about turn taking) to satisfy these requirements are not part of Besѣda®. Alternatives should be implemented.

Research

I’m going to present my research not how it chronologically happened but how it should logically flow. Attention is fundamental to any action and interaction so let’s begin with that.

Attention

The human brain is such that it can only keep focused on one thing at a time. There’s the myth known as multitasking (performing different tasks simultaneously) but that is fundamentally switching rapidly the attention between tasks.

Because language is a very complex system, the attention is dynamically shifting between the topic, the method of delivery of the content, the interlocutor etc.

Intention

An interesting paper from 2002 which logically divides the structure of the conversation in three components. Specifically, one of the components is the structure of purpose (also called intentional structure). There is one or more main purposes for the entire conversation and there are purposes for the different segments of the conversation which have a relation to the main purpose as well as between each other.

We call the collection of focus spaces available at any one time the focusing structure and the process of manipulating spaces focusing

Actions

I found validation for my beliefs and design so far simply by searching the internet for the query “pragmatic or epistemic”. A side note - epistemic is alternatively known as gnostic but that term has more religious connotations.

I found this paper “On Distinguishing Epistemic from Pragmatic Action” in which amusingly two scientists perform rigorous examination on people playing the video game Tetris. They observed that some actions cannot be explained with the traditional conceptual model of action so they introduced a new concept - epistemic action: “actions performed to uncover information that is hidden or hard to compute mentally”.

Additionally, researching this distinction lead to this paper about emotions as epistemic actions. The introduction contains a wonderfully rich summary about research on emotions. I recommend the paper. It also provoked me to rethink my previous work on emotions.

Turn taking

This research work was produced by many scientists and contains a clear structure of the adjacency pair and the three expansions: before, between and after.

a turn’s talk will be heard as directed to a prior turn’s talk, unless special techniques are used to locate some other talk to which it is directed

by John Heritage

Some of these special techniques are mentioned at figure 12 in the paper which is referred to in the intention section of this blog post. For example - cue phrases such as “now”, “but”, “anyways”, “this reminds me of”. Other techniques are the intonation, tense and aspect.

Analysis

One communicator who used Besѣda® argued that he doesn’t know what beforehand what the intention is for a specific message. I appreciate this author’s eloquent explanation about action:

does not necessarily require a premeditated hypothesis that is deliberately tested, but can be a very simple behavioral mechanism - Wendy Wilutzky

Implementation

The design mimics everyday behaviour: attend to => intend to => act upon.

In terms of attention - Besѣda® tracks if the listener is adjusting their intention while the interlocutor is speaking because that likely means that s/he is not paying attention to the content of the delivery.

Focus spaces in Besѣda® are containers which hold the graphical repsensentations of the conversational moves. The containers can be switched which is in itself the act of focusing.

Besѣda® is based on the V.I.C.T.O.R.I.A. communication framework and intentions are central to the use of the system - each of the 48 pragmatic postures is an intention. At a later time I’m going to share the framework publically.

Result

Whereas usually deixis (“this”, “here”, “then”) relies on implicit context, using visualisation makes it clear what is being referred; there is no need to restate one’s own or another person’s previous utterance to refer to it.

Implications

The author makes the following hypothesis:

Roadmap

The present development opens the possibility to include designing the turn - recipient design, dis/preference and other functions.

Changelog

Read Next

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Introducing conversation genres - how they are defined and implemented. This higher order structure allows participants to engage easily in more complex conversations.

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The operational and existential interralational types of conflict. The changes to the size of the original problem during the conflict lifecycle. Speech actions and threshold moments in the narrative.