22:20, Wednesday 13 Nov., 2002 Link

Message Types in Goal-Oriented Discourse: "In goal-oriented communication, a conversation can be thought of as consisting primarily of transitions between a number of distinguishable states. The utterances that signify these transitions fall into a small number of recognizable categories. The purpose of this paper is to explore how to enumerate, for a chosen goal, these categories and to determine whether it is possible to create a theory whereby they can be consistently recognized, with an eye towards designing a system which will classify utterances for use in MoversWorld, a multi-user problem solving environment".

(Are these categories applicable in many-to-many communication, for example between two political wings? And, not being funny or anything, but doesn't "goal oriented" hint at game and, given that, don't state transitions sound like transitions between game-states, aka moves?)