Social talk: making conversation with people and machine

Social or interactive talk differs from task-based or instrumental interactions in many ways. Quantitative knowledge of these differences will aid the design of convincing human-machine interfaces for applications requiring machines to take on roles including social companions, healthcare providers, or tutors. We briefly review accounts of social talk from the literature. We outline a three part data collection of human-human, human-woz and human-machine dialogs incorporating light social talk and a guessing game. We finally describe our ongoing experiments on the corpus collected.