Discourse and Communication:
Invitation to Contribute to a Special Issue
“Conversation Analysis and Conversational Technologies” Issue Editors:
Saul Albert, Hendrik Buschmeier, Elizabeth Stokoe, & Wyke Stommel
We are pleased to invite researchers to submit a paper to Discourse and Communication for a special issue on conversation analysis and conversational technologies.
Conversational technologies are currently in the headlines as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Microsoft’s Bing, and Google’s Bard have opened chatbot interfaces for large language models to a mass market. But how “conversational” are these technologies in terms of being able to recognise and use fundamental conversational structures like turn-taking, sequence organisation, and repair? Ethnomethodological conversation analysis (EMCA) researchers have had a long and critical relationship with the development of such technologies (see, e.g., the works collected in Luff, 1990), and have offered foundational empirical perspectives on human-computer interaction (HCI, e.g., Suchman 2007) as part of a wider movement of phenomenology-informed scepticism towards claims of artificial intelligence (AI) (Dreyfus, 1992). Now, in the early 2020s, we have reached the point where studies of everyday conversation regularly involve our interactions with and through such technologies (Mlynář et al, frth; Porcheron et al, 2018). Detailed analysis of interactions with everyday conversational technologies have inevitably, therefore, drawn on studies of what Schegloff (2007: xiii-xiv) describes as ‘generic orders of organization’ such as the ‘turn-taking problem’ (e.g., Pelikan & Broth, 2016; Cyra & Pitsch, 2017), the ‘trouble’ problem (e.g., Pelikan, Broth & Keevallik, 2020; Stommel, de Rijk & Boumans, 2022), and the problem of overall structural organisation (e.g., Pitsch et al, 2009; Licoppe & Rollet, 2020).
However, while these and other studies have contributed to a burgeoning field of research applying EM/CA concepts and methods within HCI, there are still many unanswered ontological and methodological questions. For example, how (if at all) should we conceptualize conversational technologies as ‘participants’ in conversation (Krummheuer, 2015; Alač, 2016)? And are the training data used to develop conversational technologies—often based on written texts or simulated interaction—ever capable of enabling such systems to emulate real conversation (Stokoe et al, 2020)? Such questions point towards the possibility of developing a more comprehensive program of ethnomethodological respecifications of AI, accountability, and agency (Yu-cheng 2022; Reeves, 2022). Perhaps bringing together EMCA single case analyses of conversational technology in action (Schegloff, 1987) can contribute to fundamental research into the generic orders of conversational structure—to forms of “analysis that will yield the technology of conversation” itself (Sacks, 1984, p. 413).
The aim of the special issue is to publish manuscripts based on empirical studies examining any conversational technology domain, including human-computer interaction (e.g., voice assistants, dialogue systems, social robots, chatbots, etc.) as well as technologies for evaluating human-human social interaction (e.g., speech analytics, sentiment analysis, benchmarking frameworks etc.), through conversation analysis and related approaches in ethnomethodology, discursive psychology, and membership categorization analysis. Methodological, theoretical and review papers on the role and potential of conversation analysis, and related approaches, as an approach to examine conversational technologies are also encouraged.
The special issue also aims to incorporate responses to and commentaries on papers from conversational technology experts working in industry.
Abstracts of up to two pages (single space, 11-point font minimum, to allow space for references and data, if included) are sought initially and will be reviewed to check that proposed papers fit with the special issue scope. It is also important that manuscripts reflect the aims and scope of the journal, and these can be accessed via the journal homepage.
Please submit a structured abstract containing an introduction, objectives, methods (for empirical studies, e.g., dataset, ethics, analytic approach) or approach (for methodological, theoretical and review papers), findings/key points, and conclusion/implications.
Key dates:
- Abstracts due: April 28th, 17:00 AOE, 2023.
- Notification date: May 19th, 2023
- Completed articles due: September 30th, 2023.
Submission of Abstracts and Full Articles:
Your abstract of up to two pages should be sent to the special issue editors in the first instance by email: e.stokoe@lse.ac.uk. The special issue editors will review all abstracts to ensure that proposed papers fit with the remit of this issue. If your abstract is accepted, a full article of no longer than 4500 words should be submitted by September 11th 2023, though their publication remains subject peer review. Authors should closely adhere to the journal guidelines about article types and the submission process.
The guest editors for this special issue are Saul Albert, Hendrik Buschmeier, Elizabeth Stokoe, & Wyke Stommel. Enquiries about this special issue should be directed to the guest editors.
References:
Alač, M. (2016). Social robots: Things or agents? AI & Society, 31(4), 519–535. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-015-0631-6
Cyra, K., & Pitsch, K. (2017). Dealing with Long Utterances. Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Human Agent Interaction – HAI ‘17. https://doi.org/10.1145/3125739.3132586
Dreyfus, H. L. (1992). What computers still can’t do: A critique of artificial reason. MIT press.
Krummheuer, A. (2015). Technical agency in practice: The enactment of artefacts as conversation partners, actants and opponents. PsychNology Journal, 13(2–3), 179–202.
Luff, P. (Ed.). (1990). Computers and conversation. Academic Press.
Mlynář, J., de Rijk, L., Liesenfeld, A., Albert, S., Stommel, W., & Topinková, R. (frth). Interacting with AI: A scoping review of empirical ethnomethodological and conversation analytic studies.
Pelikan, H. R. M., & Broth, M. (2016). Why that nao? How humans adapt to a conventional humanoid robot in taking turns-at-talk. Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 4921–4932. https://doi.org/10.1145/2858036.2858478
Pelikan, H. R. M., Broth, M., & Keevallik, L. (2020). ‘Are you sad, Cozmo?’: How humans make sense of a home robot’s emotion displays. Proceedings of the 2020 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction, 461–470. https://doi.org/10.1145/3319502.3374814
Porcheron, M., Fischer, J. E., Reeves, S., & Sharples, S. (2018). Voice interfaces in everyday life. Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1145/3173574.3174214
Licoppe, C., & Rollet, N. (2020). ‘Je dois y aller’ : Analyses de séquences de clôtures entre humains et robot. Réseaux, 220–221(2–3), 151-193. https://doi.org/10.3917/res.220.0151
Pitsch, K., Kuzuoka, H., Suzuki, Y., Sussenbach, L., Luff, P., & Heath, C. (2009). ‘The first five seconds’: Contingent stepwise entry into an interaction as a means to secure sustained engagement in HRI. RO-MAN 2009 – The 18th IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication, 985–991. https://doi.org/10.1109/ROMAN.2009.5326167
Reeves, S. (2022). Navigating Incommensurability Between Ethnomethodology, Conversation Analysis, and Artificial Intelligence (arXiv:2206.11899). arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2206.11899
Sacks, H. (1984). On doing ‘being ordinary’. In J. Heritage & J. M. Atkinson (Eds.), Structures of social action: Studies in conversation analysis (pp. 413–429). Cambridge University Press.
Schegloff, E. A. (1987). Analyzing Single Episodes of Interaction: An Exercise in Conversation Analysis. Social Psychology Quarterly, 50(2), 101. https://doi.org/10.2307/2786745
Suchman, L. (2007). Human-machine reconfigurations: Plans and situated actions. Cambridge University Press.
Stokoe, E., Sikveland, R. O., Albert, S., Hamann, M., & Housley, W. (2020). Can humans simulate talking like other humans? Comparing simulated clients to real customers in service inquiries. Discourse Studies, 22(1), 87–109. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461445619887537
Stommel, W., Rijk, L. de, & Boumans, R. (2022). ‘Pepper, what do you mean?’ Miscommunication and repair in robot-led survey interaction. Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN). https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9900528/
Yu-cheng, L. (2022). Making the world observable and accountable: An ethnomethodological inquiry into the distinction between illustration and exhaustion. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 9(1), Article 1. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-022-01314-1