PaRasession on Topics in Interactive Discourse Influence of the Problem Context

1.3 The roles of the two par~cicipants are_ also not fixed completely. In the type C interaction, sometimes P2 paz~ly plays the role of an ex~ (or at least appears to do so) believing that his/her ex~ advice may help the system answer the question more 'easily' or 'efficiently'. For example l, in a pollution data base P1 may ask: Has company A dumped any ,~Bstes last week? and follow up with advice: arsenic first. In ~ expert-apprentice interactlon, the e xper~c's advice is assumed to be useful by the apprentice. In the data base domain it is not clear whether the 'expert' advice provided by the user is always useful. It does however provide infor~ration about the user which can be helpful in presenting the response in an appropriate manner; for example, if arsenic indeed was one of the wastes dumped, -~hen, perhaps, it should be lis:ed first.