Anais do IHC'2001 - Departamento de Informática e Estatística - UFSC

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Anais do IHC’2001 - IV Workshop sobre Fatores Humanos em Sistemas Computacionais
Task CheckBalanceAccount (Domain Information)
sequence
{
Dialog AccountNumberPassword (Information Request)
Dialog ServicesSelection (Selection)
Dialog AccountServices (Selection)
Dialog AccountBalance (Domain Information)
}
where CheckBalanceAccount is the task name, Domain Information is the
semantic type of the task. This task is composed of the dialogs
AccountNumberPassword, ServicesSelection, AccountServices,
and AccountBalance, each one with its corresponding semantic type. The
clause indicates that dialog is made available simultaneously
within the current dialog. The term sequence indicates that the dialogs between system
and user will be exchanged in the specified order.
Dahis’ language has a grammar in which designers may specify the syntax and
semantics of interaction conversations. However, until now it has not addressed in depth
some important pragmatic issues that may guide designers as to how to combine these
components into a usable dialog structure. A comprehensive study of this matter was left
for future work on her dissertation.
In addition, although she claimed to be media- and environment-independent, she
provided little evidence to support this claim. In this paper, we will present a case study in
which we analyze an application in three different environments, and raise a few questions
about how her model could be enriched by analyzing linguistic aspects, in particular
through discourse analysis and pragmatics.
3. Discourse Analysis & Pragmatics
Discourse analysis can be said to study “how humans use language to communicate and, in
particular, how addressers construct linguistic messages for addressees and how addressees
work on linguistic messages in order to interpret them.” (Brown & Yule, 1983:ix). Several
views can be considered, viewing sentence-as-object, text-as-product, and discourse-asprocess.
As one may guess, the latter view is much in line with Semiotic Engineering. In it,
sentences in a discourse are considered to be an evidence of an attempt by a speaker/writer
(message producer) to communicate a message to a hearer/reader (message recipient). Both
production and interpretation processes are studied as two ends of a larger communication
process.
Some of the issues we find interesting to investigate in HCI by making a parallel
with studies in related communication fields are: topic of conversation, topic-shift, turn
taking, references and anaphors, context, co-text, presuppositions, implicatures, and so on.
We would like to refer the reader to Brown & Yule for an in-depth discussion about these
concepts. In this paper, we will approach some of these issues as they are brought up in our
case study.
In considering interaction from a conversational perspective, we may also find it
useful to try to apply studies from Pragmatics to HCI. In particular, Grice (1975) has