Action at a distance: the difference between dialogue and multilogue

The paper considers how to scale up dialogue protocols to multilogue, settings with multiple conversationalists. We extract two benchmarks to evaluate scaled up protocols based on the long distance resolution possibilities of nonsentential utterances in dialogue and multilogue in the British National Corpus. In light of these benchmarks, we then consider three possible transformations to dialogue protocols, inspired by Goffman’s audience taxonomy and formulated within an issue-based approach to dialogue management. We show that one such transformation yields protocols for querying and assertion that fulfill these benchmarks. We indicate how these protocols can be implemented in terms of conversational update rules.