The Structure of Information Dialogues: A Case Study

In the paper we consider the structure of information dialogues. Our study is based on Estonian dialogue corpus which contains two kinds of dialogues – transcriptions of spoken conversations, and dialogues collected with the Wizard of Oz method. We are using two ways for describing the structure of dialogues – a typology of dialogue acts, and a system of communicative strategies. We depart from the notion of communicative strategy introduced by Kristiina Jokinen in her Constructive Dialogue Model. The analysis of our empirical material shows that people are using similar communicative strategies in telephone conversations and computer interactions. In the same time, the structure of human-human conversation is much more complicated.