Computer Rules, Conversational Rules

There has been much controversy recently as to whether the rules of interaction discovered by conversation analysts are amenable to use by computers (Gilbert 1990; Hirst 1991; Luff, Gilbert, and Frohlich 1990). Button (1990) has argued that the rules of conversation are of a different ontological category than the rules used by computers, and that this means computers cannot be programmed to engage in conversation. Others (Fraser and Wooffitt 1990; Frohlich and Luff 1990; Gilbert, Wooffitt, and Fraser 1990) have argued to the contrary that the rules of conversation can be captured in a program, and indeed that some have been. I will argue for a third position. Button is right in his critique of existing attempts to import conversation analysis into computational linguistics and in his argument that there is a rule type mismatch. His arguments do not, however, show that computers cannot in principle be programmed to engage in conversation. I will argue by analogy to computer network protocols that an interactionist computational interpretation of the conversation analytical rules is possible, and that Button's critique can thereby be bypassed.