The Situated Behavior of MUD Back Channels

Empirical Methods in Discourse: Interpretation and Generation

Volume

Papers from the 1995 AAAI Spring Symposium

Contents

Back channel responses are normally taken to indicate either comprehension of a speaker’s plans or recognition of a speaker’s ongoing construction of a complex discourse structure. I investigate their use in the discourse of a social MUD ("multi-user dimension") where paralinguistic information is missing, and users create a sense of co-presence through the use of conventional responses that imitate back channels in face-to-face speech. Back channels are found to be present in periods with relatively little interaction, suggesting they function as measures of the attention state of an interlocutor as much as a measure of plan recognition.