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Views on Mixed-Initiative Interaction

The topic of initiative is important to a greater understanding of collaboration and interaction. It is a complex characterization of several aspects of dialogue, relating to whose purposes are being concentrated on, and who is in "control". Initiative is important for characterizing both the cooperative and competitive aspects of dialogue, including when and how to respond to the other, as well as whose agenda to follow. The concept of initiative is closely related to similar concepts from games, such as tempo in chess, or sente in go. These zero-sum games have rigid turntaking rules, in fact each player is allowed one move followed by one move of another. Initiative (e.g., tempo or senle) is then a second order concept: it relates to whether, given the turn, is a player free to use it to work towards his own goals, or is he "forced" to use it in reaction to the lead of the other player. A mixedinitiative game, would thus be one in which the initiative shifts from one player to the other throughout the course of the game. An alternative definition, applying to abstractions of games rather than actual playings, is one in which either player could have the initiative, according to the rules, (regardless of whether in any specific playing both parties actually did have the initiative at some time). Such concepts can be easily applied to language situations, in which the "move" is a speech act or dialogue move. A speaker would have the initiative if the speaker had the choice as to the content of the utterance, while the other speaker would have the initiative if the speaker had to frame the utterance in response to speech by the other speaker. For some sorts of interaction, such as a question answering system, there is a clear notion of fixed initiative, when one party is responding to requests or directives of the other. Other situations could be mixed-initiative, where initiative can change through the dialogue, and is not assigned in advance. A general dialogue situation is more complex than the above picture in two ways, though. First, the turn-taking system can be much more flexible: in general a speaker can continue with several moves or utterances, some of which are in response to the other speaker, and some of which are not. Secondly, part of the coherence of dialogue itself, the feature that distinguishes it from a random collection of utterances is this very notion of coherence with contributions by the other speaker (e.g., see (Sperber ~ Wilson 1986)). Thus just in virtue of being a coherent conversation, some aspects of a speaker’s turn will be a response to the previous speaker. One of these aspects is grounding, establishing the common ground about what has been said (Clark & Schaefer 1989; Traum & Allen 1992; Traum 1994). Given such a flexibility of turn-lengths and contents, and a requirement to reply to some degree, we can recast the definition of initiative in more unestricted dialogue as whether a speaker will only respond to the other speaker, or will instead also continue with the speaker’s own objectives.