Implementation of adequate conversational structures is a key issue in developing successful interactive user interfaces. A way of testing the adequacy of the structures is to prove the correct orientation of each communicative action towards a preceding action. We refer to this orientation leading to a certain response as the affordance of the communicative action. In this paper we present a c...

From a multimodal point of view, the functions which have generally been attributed to linguistic elements of discourse (known, as a rule, as discourse markers or connectors within the several discourse analytic theories) can also be fulfilled by prosody and nonverbal units. These types of discourse functions, here called interactive conversational signals, a subgroup of the conversational sign...

We are developing tools to support a conversational metaphor for requirements definition and analysis. Our conversational model consists of three components: (1) a hypertextual representation of requirements and their interrelations, (2) an issue-based speech act model, and (3) a typology of changes. These components act together in a model we call the Inquiry Cycle. We discuss requirements ana...