Nigel G. Ward, Georgina Bugarini, Harm Lameris
SemDial 2026, the 30th Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue
Abstract: Different people have different dialog interaction styles, but our understanding of how these are perceived is limited. We approach this problem by making two working assumptions: that interaction style perceptions are largely just the result of utterance-by-utterance perceptions of a speaker's pragmatic intent, and that pragmatically typical utterances for a speaker can be informative regarding their overall interaction style. We accordingly applied a recently-developed vector-space model of pragmatic functions to identify speaker-typical utterances. We found, among other things, indications that people are able to infer useful style information from single utterances, and that the space of interaction styles is very broad.