Theoretical Concerns for the Integration of Repair

Human conversation is messy. Speakers frequently repair their speech, and listeners must therefore integrate information across ill-formed, often fragmentary inputs. Previous dialogue systems for human-robot interaction (HRI) have addressed certain problems in dialogue repair, but there are many problems that remain. In this paper, we discuss these problems from the perspective of Conversation Analysis, and argue that a more holistic account of dialogue repair will actually aid in the design and implementation of machine dialogue systems.