A Framework for Conversational System Modeling
Introduction
There is an interesting but criticized theory in linguistics: Grice's Maxims of Conversation. This theory, introduced by British philosopher Paul Grice, attempts to explain how humans converse. That is, it provides a framework for understanding how effective communication between two people takes place.
The basic idea is rather simple: the theory posits that people want to be cooperative when speaking with others. And because they want to be cooperative, they aim to be informative, truthful, relevant, and clear when engaging in human conversation. Putting aside the provability of the theory for the moment, the goal of having an effective conversation is worth exploring in the context of modern AI systems capable of voice interaction.
How do these systems, which include popular consumer variants such as Alexa and Siri, "know" how to converse with human users? We can likely agree that they do not have the objective to be...
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