On the nature of rules and conversation

The use of findings from conversation analysis in the design of human-computer interfaces and especially in the design of computer-human speech dialogues is a matter of considerable controversy. For example, in Going up a Blind Alley (Button, 1990) and On Simulacrums of Conversation (Button and Sharrock, 1995), Button argues that conversation analysis is of only limited use in the computational modelling of interaction. He suggests that computers will never be able to converse with humans because of the fundamentally different ways in which humans and computers use rules in the production of language.We show in this paper that these arguments are neither necessary nor sufficient to rule out the possibility of computers which can be said to converse. They depend on a view about the nature of rules which is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the scope of computation. The way in which mathematical systems such as Context Free Grammars use rules is very different from the use of the rules in principle-based approaches to language or the micro-rules of neural networks. If there is a problem with conversing computers, it lies more with the true nature of the interaction that is taking place and with considerations about the nature of cognition than with the construction and use of rules.