IJCoL

Italian Journal of Computational Linguistics

7-1, 2 | 2021
Special Issue: Computational Dialogue Modelling: The
Role of Pragmatics and Common Ground in
Interaction

Toward a linguistically grounded dialog model for

chatbot design
Anna Dall’Acqua and Fabio Tamburini

Electronic version
URL: https://journals.openedition.org/ijcol/900
DOI: 10.4000/ijcol.900
ISSN: 2499-4553

Publisher
Accademia University Press

Printed version
Number of pages: 191-222

Electronic reference
Anna Dall’Acqua and Fabio Tamburini, “Toward a linguistically grounded dialog model for chatbot
design”, IJCoL [Online], 7-1, 2 | 2021, Online since 01 December 2021, connection on 26 December
2021. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/ijcol/900 ; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/ijcol.900

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Toward a linguistically grounded dialog
model for chatbot design

Anna Dall’Acqua∗ Fabio Tamburini∗∗

Università di Bologna & Injenia S.r.l. Università di Bologna

The increasing interest in various types of conversational interfaces has been supported by a
progressive standardization of the technological frameworks used to build them. However, the
landscape of available methodological frameworks for designing conversations is much more
fragmented. We propose a highly generalizable methodology for designing conversational flows
rooted in a functionalist-pragmatics perspective, with an explicit adherence to a conversationalist
approach. In parallel, we elaborate a practical-procedural workflow for undertaking chatbots
projects in which we situate the theoretical starting point. At last, we elaborate a general case-
study on which we transpose the identified approach in Italian language and using one of the
most authoritative NLU platforms.

1. Introduction

One of the most exciting innovations that we are experiencing in the last decade is the
massive widespread of conversational interfaces, such as chatbots or virtual assistants
(Tsvetkova et al. 2017; Chaves et al. 2019; Dale 2016). The various attempts that have
been made to classify these technologies (Radziwill and Benton 2017; Følstad, Skjuve,
and Brandtzaeg 2019; Hussain, Sianaki, and Ababneh 2019; Mathur and Singh 2018) and
the absence of an unequivocal taxonomy (Braun and Matthes 2019) surely contribute to
the lack of a methodological approach for designing conversational agents. They are
perceived as something in between humans and web search engines characterised by a
conversational way of expression and the capability of managing input and output in
natural language (Dale 2016; Braun and Matthes 2019).
We are witnessing a flourishing literature about technologies, techniques and ap-
plications for building conversational interfaces (Ahmad et al. 2018; Adamopoulou
and Moussiades 2020). Unfortunately, we cannot say the same for the elaboration of
methodological guidelines that can be pursued for the designing of conversational
interfaces, especially from a linguistic point of view.
This is the context in which our research comes to light. We think that a solid
anchor in linguistics and therefore a scientific knowledge of what human conversation
is may be the key for identifying a generalizable methodological approach for designing
conversational agents.

∗ Dept. of Classical Philology and Italian Studies, University of Bologna, Italy and Injenia S.r.l., Bologna,
Italy. E-mail: [email protected]
∗∗ Dept. of Classical Philology and Italian Studies, University of Bologna, Italy.
E-mail: [email protected]. Corresponding author.

© 2021 Associazione Italiana di Linguistica Computazionale

Italian Journal of Computational Linguistics Volume 7, Number 1-2

1.1 A methodological lack in conversation design

A relevant set of studies have been produced on this topic. The first agents were imple-
mented with simple pattern-matching techniques and template-based responses (Weizen-
baum 1966; Colby, Weber, and Hilf 1971). They could support a continuative concate-
nation of utterances but they were still far away from today’s state of the art. The same
pattern recognition model shaped the architecture of A.L.I.C.E., a chatbot annotated
with AIML, a mark-up language derived from the metalanguage XML (Wallace 2003;
Shawar and Atwell 2007). After 2016 there has been a growing interest for chatbots in
various areas and applications, mostly because they were considered new productive
and entertaining objects not reducible as mere assistants, but capable of a way of
interacting that brings them closer to users (Dale 2016).
Today, most of them rely on machine learning algorithms and Natural Language
Understanding modules, but still even the more conversational of the agents can just
vaguely simulate conversational exchanges enriched by mutual understanding as we
know it as humans.
Adamopolou and Moussiades (2020) distinguish between two ways of developing
chatbots: using any programming language like Java, Clojure, Python, C++, PH, Ruby
and Lisp or using state-of-the-art platforms. At this time, the leading NLU cloud plat-
forms supported by machine learning are: Google’s Dialogflow in both versions ES and
CX, Facebook’s wit.ai, Microsoft LUIS, IBM Watson Conversation and Amazon Lex.
These platforms share a common information-retrieval approach based on what Moore
and Arar (2019) identify as Intent-Entity-Context-Response (IECR) paradigm. An intent
“[...] represents a mapping between what the user says and what action should be taken
by the chatbot” (Adamopoulou and Moussiades 2020, 377). Intents recognize the con-
versational action a user is performing, while entities are tools used to extract particular
details and parameters values from natural language inputs. They can be either system-
defined or customized by the developer. Contexts are “[...] strings that store the context
of the object the user is referring to” (Adamopoulou and Moussiades 2020, 378) used to
capture the context of the current topic. Responses consist of what the chatbot actually
answers in chat. This approach aims to extract contextual and detailed information
from users’ inputs and respond accordingly to the users’ intention, extracting domain-
specific entities and associating the corresponding intent, which means that machine
learning algorithms are used for intent identification and entities extraction tasks, but
responses are typically pre-authored by a designer (Moore and Arar 2019).
Generative models capable of automatically generating answers considering cur-
rent and previous user messages are also in production, but there are still difficulties
in building and training them and they are not available in the major commercial
platforms (Adamopoulou and Moussiades 2020). Studies on the evaluation of these
platforms show similar performances in terms of combined f-score (Liu et al. 2019; Braun
et al. 2017), with slight differences in intent identification task (Canonico and De Russis
2018), especially with longer utterances (Zubania et al. 2020).
Although the technological progresses and the wide technical landscape here out-
lined, we are facing today a lack in designing domain specific conversational interfaces.
The current state of conversational interfaces is limited in terms of established user
interface design patterns: it is still unclear when chatbots should be text-based or button-
based, or which are the best practices in designing a chatbot conversations. The question
about how to structure the interaction with this new medium for creating efficient
conversational experiences is still opened. Schiavo and Fadhil (2020) investigate the
available scientific literature about interaction patterns and design principles in health-

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Dall’Acqua and Tamburini Toward a linguistically grounded dialog model for chatbot design

care and identify four common theoretical themes in which the specific features are
categorized: bot-user interaction, bot-response, bot-development, user experience. Since
our work has a predominant linguistic focus, we mainly concentrate our attention on
linguistic features, such as tone of voice, flexibility of responses, conversation length
and user engagement in general. Schiavo and Fadhil (2020) treat each feature separately,
offering relevant suggestions, but no univocal applicable design methodology in that
sense.
Some studies embrace sociolinguistic theories: Chaves et al. (2019) apply to the
design of a specific use case the register theory, Bennett (2018) and Dippold et al. (2020)
identify Interactional Sociolinguistics as key to express chatbot’s personality through
language in responses and prompts design.
There are multiple works concerning the users’ perceptions while texting with
chatbots and what they would expect from a satisfying conversation with them: Hill
et al. (2015) demonstrate that users hold long conversations also with conversational
agents, adapting to chatbots language without overlooking that they were actually
chatting with robots. Svenningsson and Faraon (2019) identify the factors of perceived
humanness in chatbots’ responses and underline their possible applications in terms
of design guidelines. Jain et al. (2018) focus on new chatbots’ users identifying guide-
lines more related to flow buildings. Kvale et al. (2019) draw practical and theoretical
implications from a manual analysis of chatbots conversations, such as the value of
cross-disciplinary teams and the need of diligence in chatbots training. Although these
studies end with practical advice, they are far too generic for laying the foundations for
a methodology.
There is consistent number of systematic guidelines on how to design conversa-
tional interfaces with a practical-computational procedure on how to approach chatbots’
projects, reported also in McTear (2020). Some of them do have a commercial vocation
(Hall 2018), other focus on technical issues (Shevat 2017; Dasgupta 2018) but even the
more linguistically or cognitive oriented ones do not display a clear affiliation to a
complete framework of analysis rooted in linguistics (Pearl 2016; Cohen, Giangola, and
Balogh 2004).
We think that it is fundamental for creating effective conversational agents that
should actually converse with humans and whose aim is to simulate the mechanism of
human interaction to refer to a solid linguistic framework. Since pragmatics is the area
of linguistics that primarily focuses on language in use also in interactional contexts, we
agree with Bianchini et al. (2017) on the importance of pragmatics in developing new
chatbots examples. Furthermore, we also agree with Bennett (2018) with the identifica-
tion of Conversation Analysis as a methodological key to design better conversational
flows.

2. Theoretical analysis of dialogue and conversation

2.1 A pragmatic perspective

The term pragmatics is conventionally credited to Charles W. Morris (1938) who first
introduced a “pragmatic dimension” in the context of relations between signs, inter-
preters and objects (Bazzanella 2008). Influenced by Charles P. Peirce (1932) and in
agreement with Carnap (1938), he distinguished three “dimensions of semiosis” (Morris
1938, 21), in which pragmatics addressed the relations between signs and who use and
interpret them (Horn and Ward 2006). Since pragmatics is an interdisciplinary “hardly
a well-integrated field of research” (van Dijk 2009, 13), it is preferable to speak about

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a pragmatic perspective towards language instead of a pragmatic theory (Bazzanella

2008; Bublitz and Norrick 2011). The adoption of a pragmatic perspective also allows
to embrace the contributions from philosophy, psychology, sociology, linguistics and
the multiple definitions it has (Levinson 1983; Leech 1983; Katz and Fodor 1963; Ariel
2010; Turner 1999).
The philosophers of language Austin (1962), Grice (1975) and Searle (1969) influ-
enced a notion of pragmatics in contrast with the chomskyan analysis of language as
an abstract instrument independent by the context of use. Reflections in this direction
are a consistent part of the most common handbooks of pragmatics, such as Levinson
(1983), Leech (1983), Mey (1993), Yule (1996), and Verschueren (1999). It thus seems
reasonable "[...] to claim that the ensuing pragmatic turn was most notably induced
by J.L. Austin, J.R. Searle and H.P. Grice, who were interested in utterance meaning
rather than sentence or word meaning, i.e. in studying unique historical events created
by actual speakers to perform linguistic acts in actual situational contexts in order to
accomplish specific goals” (Bublitz and Norrick 2011, 2).
The approach adopted in this work is functionalist, that is, “[...] that it attempts to
explain facets of linguistic structure by reference to non-linguistic pressures and causes”
(Levinson 1983, 7). This perspective aims to explain linguistic phenomena relying on
pragmatics principles (Givon 1979; Hymes 1962) and opens to different developable
possibilities such as an ethnomethodological method rooted in sociology (Garfinkel
1996; Goffman 1983; Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson 1992) and a psycholinguistic ap-
proach such as the alignment model (Pickering and Garrod 2004; Branigan, Pickering,
and Cleland 2000; Szmrecsanyi 2005).
In both cases, the study of pragmatics is connected to the use of language in com-
munication. Since communication inevitably involves at least two parties, the primary
focus of pragmatics are “language use and language users in interaction” (Bublitz and
Norrick 2011, 4). Towards this intersubjective dimension, Kerbrat-Orecchioni (2001)
speaks of pragmatique interactionniste, whose main objects of research are manifestations
of verbal interactions, such as dialogue and conversation.
Dialogue could be taken as “[...] the elementary and universal form of human com-
munication” (Luckmann 1990, 58), whose basic principles are most salient in conversa-
tions and authentic discourses (Linell 2001). Levinson (1983, 284) defines conversation
as “[...] the predominant kind of talk in which two or more participants freely alternate
in speaking, which generally occurs outside specific institutional settings”. In the broad-
est sense, it includes both face-to-face social communications and technology-mediated
forms of interactions: all these different manifestations can be classified according to
different criteria. A common distinction bases on the final scope of the exchange: social
interactions’ aim is building and maintaing rapports, while transactional interactions
mainly fulfill practical goals (Brown and Yule 1983; Clark et al. 2019). Hakulinen’s
classification (2009) takes into account the degree of institutionality, the activity type
or genre, the channel and participation framework; Linell and Luckmann (1991) con-
sider the degree of asymmetry between the interlocutors. According to Schegloff, the
ordinary conversation is the most general and flexible type of conversation from which
the other types are adapted for particular purposes. It is defined as “[...] the basic
medium of ‘interactional exchange’ [...] in whatever practices it is embodied in those
settings” (Schegloff 1999, 413). Moore and Arar (2019) identify service, teaching and
counseling conversations as derived typologies from the ordinary conversations. They are
all charachterized by roles’s fixedness and influenced by their settings. Since Moore and
Arar (2019) embrace a strictly conversationalist point of view, their focus is on identi-

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Dall’Acqua and Tamburini Toward a linguistically grounded dialog model for chatbot design

fying the underlying structure of conversation, which is suitable for slight adaptations
according to the settings and contexts real conversations may occur in.

2.2 Pragmatic frameworks of analysis

There are several useful frameworks to analyze dialogical and conversational inter-
actions. In the field of pragmatics, Haugh (2012) discerns two key trends to place
conversational interactions: at the level of meaning and abstract principles referring to
the works of language philosophers such as Grice (1989) and Searle (1969); at the level
of the performance the analysis of authentic data referring to Conversation Analysis
(Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson 1974) and Interactional Sociolinguistics (Gumperz 1982).
In this section, we summarise the key points of each and the possible adaptation to a
human-computer interaction.
The first trend is situated on a cognitive level and understands conversation as a
“joint activity” whose progression is determined by the concatenation of “joint actions”
(Clark 1996, 30). They are the result of the coordination of individual actions on two
levels: "There is coordination of both content, what the participants intend to do, and
processes, the physical and mental systems they recruit in carrying out those inten-
tions.” (Clark 1996, 59). Regarding language use, “[...] a central problem is coordinating
what speakers mean” (1996, 73). The idea of conversation as action determined by an
undercurrent of communicative intention between the participants was formulated by
Austin (1962) and Searle (1969, 1983). These studies have been enormously influential
in the pragmatic approach of conversation: they allow to “[...] formalise rules and
principles by which speakers mean (and to a lesser extent do) things” in conversation,
abstracting from the conversation itself (Haugh 2012, 251). For example, the austinian
notion of performativity frames new perspectives in human-computer-conversations,
such as the collaborative action of “We” Human-and-Technology (Cho and Yoon 2013;
Cho 2015) and the methodology of the Performative Experience Design (Spence 2016).
Intentionality and delivery of implicit meanings are Grice’s main objects of inquiry
(1975). He can be considered one of the pioneers of inferential pragmatics (Ariel 2012).
Most of all the cooperation principle and the conversational maxims proposed by Grice
(1975) and later updated by Sperber and Wilson (1995) are a consistent part of the study
of pragmatics today and involved in the implementation of dialogue systems from a
methodological point of view: Jacquet et al. (2018; 2019; 2019b) evaluate the violation of
the gricean maxims in textual online conversations; Saygin and Cicekli (2002) propose
an empirical study study of human-computer interactions within the context of the
Loebner Prize Contest.
Lakoff’s theory of politeness (1973) is an attempt of expansion of Grice’s con-
versational maxims. This theory has been extensively criticized because it is hardly
generalizable (Al-Duleimi, Rashid, and Abdullah 2016) and the key terms used in it
are culturally determined and they therefore need to be clearly defined (Brown 1976;
Tannen 1984).
Brown and Levinson (1987) propose instead an expansion of the studies on polite-
ness made by Goffman (1967) introducing the concepts of positive face and negative face,
which are respectively the need to be approved by the others and the need of autonomy.
The importance of politeness in the realization of conversational interfaces is attested
among the others by Følstad et al. (2018) and Nordheim, Følstad, and Bjørkli (2019), who
list politeness as a factor perceived to affect trust in chatbots for customer service. As
far as practical chatbots realizations are concerned, Hall (2018) includes it as an element
to take into account during the conversation design, while De Jong, Theune, and Hofs

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(2008) adapt the model of politeness strategy elaborated by Brown and Levinson (1987)
and of the linguistic alignment (Pickering and Garrod 2004) to a virtual museum guide.
In relation to the second trend, the dominant perspectives are Interactional Sociolin-
guistics (IS) and Conversation Analysis (CA).
The core idea of Interactional Sociolinguistics is that what happens in a sequence
of talk can be analyzed in its social contexts and that humans in talk accomplish
social goals. A central concept of this approach are contextualization cues, “[...] by which
speakers signal and listeners interpret what the activity is, how the semantic content is
to be understood and how each sentence relates to what precedes or follows” (Gumperz
1982). Feine et al. (2020) offer an overview of the implementation of social cues in differ-
ent kinds of conversational agents, while Bennet (2018) translates conversational cues
in the realm of text-based chats, arguing that a strategic manipulation of orthography
to convey conversation cues could help the design of chatbots personality and could
situate them on different levels of enthusiasm or considerateness. Dippold et al. (2020)
attest how a microlevel of design linguistic analysis based on Interactional Sociolinguis-
tics can be useful for chatbot designers for creating engaging interactions and provide
specific guidelines. Relevant studies in the field of Computer-Mediated Communication
(CMC) describe the modification on the different levels of language that apply on digital
mediated communication: Crystal (2001) and Herring (2012) are pioneers for the English
language, while for Italian the work from Pistolesi (2018) is certainly a relevant reference
point.
Another approach to dialogical interaction is Conversation Analysis. Levinson
(1983) includes in his textbooks on pragmatics a chapter entitled Conversational structure,
in which he compares Conversation Analysis and Discourse Analysis as two opposite
methodological frameworks with a preference for the first one, characterized by an
empirical and inductive vocation.
CA is a subfield of sociology whose origin is influenced by ethnomethodological
studies (Garfinkel 1996), but the publications of the firsts and more influential CA
contributions in 1974 A simplest systematics in the flagship Journal of the Linguistic Society
and of The preference of self-correction in 1977 on Language both by Schegloff, Sacks and
Jefferson established a relationship between CA and Linguistics from its origins (Fox et
al. 2018).
The aim of this discipline is providing a systematic description of oral language prac-
tices (Schegloff 1992, 120) between humans, in order to formalise it into key structural
elements that occur in the variety of contexts in which conversations may take place.
Unlike ethnomethodology, whose observations are based on memory and intuition
(Pallotti 2007), the methodological approach of CA is fundamentally empirical and its
focus was a description of language as a tool used by social actors in interactions. In this
respect, the object of study is an interactive activity contextually situated, where sentences
are “[...] produced by someone, for someone else, at a certain time, in a certain way”
(Hoey and Kendrick 2017). In the words of Schegloff and Sacks (1992, 70), CA is a “[...]
naturalistic observational discipline that could deal with the detail of social action(s)
rigorously, empirically and formally”.
The systematic descriptions of such practices leads to discovering the machinery
(Sacks 1984, 84) underlying conversations, a mechanics of how people naturally talk in
a variety of settings (Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson 1974; Schegloff 2007) made of some
key concepts that regulate interactions. This approach supports the existence of some
structural patterns that occur in conversational exchanges without consideration of the
delivered content and with slight adaptations according to the settings and contexts of

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Dall’Acqua and Tamburini Toward a linguistically grounded dialog model for chatbot design

realization: it is therefore clear the enormous potential it may have in Human-Computer

interaction studies.
We will describe four elements of the descriptive apparatus for analyzing inter-
actional structures, adhering to the analysis made by Pallotti (2007), Moore and Arar
(2019) and Hoey and Kendrick (2017), which are today “[...] common stock for everyone
doing CA” (Pallotti 2007, 7).

2.3 Key concepts of the conversation machinery

The strategy people use to manage the conversational traffic in interaction and the
distribution of talk among the parties is turn-taking, known to be the feature that makes
conversations orderly without significant clashes, overlappings or long pauses. Sacks
et al. (1974, 702) describe it as a simplest systematics composed of two components
and a coordination of the ending of the turn with the start of the next. The turn-
constructional units (TCU) consist of linguistic unit-types such as sentential, clausal,
phrasal or lexical constructions that form a “[...] recognizably complete utterance in a
given context” (Hoey and Kendrick 2017). These bound units are defined in functional
terms, being understood that usually “[...] a complete (linguistic) action corresponds
to a complete syntactic unit, so that the TCU boundary turns out to coincide with the
clause boundary” (Pallotti 2007, 8). Once a turn is perceived as completed, occur a turn-
transfer using turn-allocation techniques such as self-selection and other selection in
specific transition-relevance place (TRP). A hierarchically organized set of rules governs
the turn construction and coordinates the transition so as to minimize the gaps and
overlappings (Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson 1974).
Turns do not occur haphazardly, but are sequentially organized into coherent courses
of actions (Schegloff 2007). The minimal unit of sequential organization is a two-move
sequence, the adjacency pairs, in which the connection between the parts depends on the
conditional relevance: the occurrence of a first pair sets up the relevance of the second part
to follow (Schegloff 1968). Schegloff and Sacks (1973) give some examples of adjacency
pairs, such as question-answer, greeting-greeting, offer-acceptance/refusal. Moore and
Arar (2019, 65) also include farewell-farewell, assessment-assessment, inquiry-answer,
request-grant/deny, invitation-acceptance/decline, accusing-admitting/denying. Since
the first part sets up an expectation, the absence of the accepted second part is noticeable
and the participants may require explanations or justifications for not having answered
or for not having chosen the preferred option (Schegloff, Jefferson, and Sacks 1977). Even
if the first part is usually directly followed by the second part, it could happen that for
satisfying various requirements the completion of the first part has to be suspended for
one or more turns. Sequences are therefore inherently expandable through additional
turns over and above the two basic units of sequences. Expansions are allowed before
the first pair part (pre-expansion), between the first and the second pair part (inserted
expansion) and after the second pair part (post-expansion) (Schegloff 2007, 26). Another
kind of sequence are the storytelling sequences (Jefferson 1978), used to express stories,
anecdotes, or instructions whose content have to be distributed on multiple turns. They
are often introduced by pre-announcement, namely the story preface (Schegloff 2007,
41). Sequences are an instrument for organizing utterances produced by the partici-
pants, while sequences themselves are organized into activities that define the “overall
structural conversation” (Schegloff and Sacks 1973, 71), such as conversation openings
and closings, instruction giving or troubleshooting.
Another relevant element in CA is turn design, which deals with how speakers build
their turns to achieve some goals and to deliver contents for a specific audience (Drew

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2020). Turn design principles concern the speakers’ orientation to contiguity and their
tendency to display connections between what they are saying and what the other said
in prior turns; the specific lexico-syntactic adopted by the speakers to pursue the desired
action and the recipient design principle, which is “[...] a multitude of respects in which the
talk by a party in a conversation is constructed or designed in ways which display an
orientation and sensitivity to the [...] co-participants [...] with regard to word selection,
topic selection, admissibility and ordering of sequences, options and obligations for
starting and terminating conversations [...]” (Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson 1974, 727).
It implies the consideration of the relationship between the interlocutors, their mutual
knowledge and common ground (Clark 1996). The other principle to take into account in
turn design is minimization, known as the speakers’ tendency to deliver a message or
to complete an action without using more words than necessary, but still being recog-
nisable from the recipient the conversation is tailored to (Sacks and Schegloff 2007). In
other words, the recipient’s design is prioritarian over minimization: the speaker has
to be efficient, using as few words as possible without preventing the interlocutor to
understand.
The last element of conversation machinery are the repair practices spontaneously
accomplished by the speakers in case of troubles in speaking, hearing or understanding
(Schegloff, Jefferson, and Sacks 1977). Hoey and Kendrick (2017) describe the three basic
components of a repair procedure: a trouble source, a repair initiation (i. e. a signal that
begins the repair procedure) and the repair solution (i. e. the actual repair, for example
paraphrasing or repeating a word part of the prior turns). Both the speaker (self) and
the recipient (other) can initiate a repair procedure and/or accomplish a repair solution.
Repair mechanisms are thus distinguished relying on who initiates the repair (self-
initiated or other-initiated) and on who effectively accomplishes the repair (self-repaired
or other-repaired).
Some attempts have been made adopting CA as a theoretical framework for im-
plementing conversational agents: Luff et al. (1990) early imagined the potentialities of
CA both as analytical tool in HCI applications and as inspiration for design methodol-
ogy. Wooffit et al. (1997) adopt CA as a sociological perspective for studying human-
computer dialogues. More recently, Lotze (2016) includes CA in the theoretical ap-
proaches used to analyze human-chatbot corpora. Hirst (2001) reviews Luff, Gilbert and
Frohlich (1990) focusing on the different conceptual perspectives from which CA and
Discourse Analysis are shaped, defending the necessity of considering CA studies in
the field of Natural Language Understanding (NLU) technologies and applications. At
that time technologies were not mature enough to adhere to such a complex theoretical
framework, but at present time more and more studies go in this direction, such as the
works from Gervits et al. (2020) and Michael and Möller (2020).

2.4 The Natural Conversation Framework (NCF) as a promising starting point for a
design methodology

The work by Moore and Arar (2019) on NCF represents an innovative proposal in the
scientific-industrial landscape. Moore and Arar worked together at IBM-Research in
designing prototypes for novel forms of interactions for conversational interfaces and
Moore is currently developing a conversational methodology founded on the qualita-
tive models from the field of CA. This is not the first work in this direction: Moore
(2013) and Moore et al. (2018) collect interesting contributions on specific design issues
generalizable to various use-cases, such as Bickmore et al. (2018) and Candello and
Pinhanez (2018) and lay the groundwork for the practical guide published in 2019.

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Moore and Arar (2018) especially introduce the lack of a methodology for designing
conversations and invite us to embrace the complexities of human dialogues in order to
create machines we can interact with in a natural way.
Moore and Arar (2019) can be considerd a potential starting point for drawing a
complete conversation methodology for different reasons. First of all, they argue that
among the possible natural-language interaction styles the conversation-centric style is
the future of AI interfaces1 , since it aims to reproduce a real conversation-first way of
interaction. Therefore, they situate themselves on a higher level than simply offering a
versatile practical procedure: they embrace a specific linguistic approach and translate
it in the realization of human-machine dialogues. The sub-field of research of the User
Experience Design they steer is rooted in CA, whose methodological principles and key
elements are described in previous section.
The NCF traces the basics mechanics of conversational patterns documented in
CA and consists of four parts: an underlying interaction model based on expandable
sequences, a distinctive content format based on the interaction model, a reusable
pattern language for common conversational activities, a general method for navigating
conversational applications.
The interaction model is based on the sequential structure of conversations, in
which sequences are “[...] general patterns that [...] can be used and reused in all
kinds of different situations and settings, for all kinds of different purposes” (Moore
and Arar 2019, 65). Like adjacency pair sequences and the storytelling sequences in
CA, this model should support sequence expansions, as “[...] natural indicators of the
participants’ state of understanding of a turn-by-turn basis” (Moore and Arar 2019).
This is a more natural and interactive pattern than the simple two-turn sequence model
of the majority of chatbots and virtual assistants currently available.
In order to apply the interaction model accurately, a particular format is required
for the content of the conversational application. (Moore and Arar 2019, 70) express it
translating the principle of minimization (Sacks and Schegloff 2007) into three guiding
principles: “limit agent utterances to a single sentence or less”, “break paragraphs down
into their parts” and “let users control the level of detail”. These criteria enable designers
to break-up document-formatted content into bite-sized intents, which can be requested
by the users through simple queries.
Nevertheless NCF does not provide a library of industry-specific content in the form
of intents and entities, but a systematic set of dialogue patterns that constitute various
aspects of conversational competence, enable a variety of social activities and can be
configured to a wide range of use cases (Moore and Arar 2019). The catalogue proposed
by Moore and Arar (2019) is made of 15 types of patterns and 100 subpatterns2 and is
directly inspired from the examination of naturally occurring observations.
The patterns can be divided into three categories: conversational activities, sequence
level management and conversation-level management (see Figure 1). Conversational activi-
ties include patterns for managing content inside the boundaries of the conversation,
such as inquiries, requests or extended tellings. The remaining two categories help
users and agents to manage the interaction itself and occur on two levels: management

1 Other interaction-styles that imply the recognition of natural language inputs are the system-centric style,
the content-centric style and the visual-centric style. They differ from the conversation-centric style because
they do recognize and produce strings in natural language, but they do not exhibit the conversational
actions distinctive of the human way of communicating (Moore and Arar 2019).
2 The list is not exhaustive. Here https://ibm.biz/BdzwQU are some new patterns IBM researchers are
experimenting with.

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patterns on a sequence level help managing successful sequential interactions through

repair procedures, management patterns on a conversation level help managing con-
versations’ openings, closings and disengaging. Finally, the navigation method consists
of six simple conversational actions the users can take to get around the conversational
space.

Figure 1
Graphical representation of the Natural Conversation Framework patterns.

The so defined set of patterns is much more similar to a “language”than a “library”:

these patterns are designed to be used together and are particularly useful in service
encounters conversational interactions, which are fundamentally practical dialogues
characterized by a goal-seeking nature (Allen et al. 2001).
To show how the patterns are presented, we provide an example of sequence closer
patterns, from the category of the sequence management patterns (Moore and Arar
2019, 142). Sequence closers enable users to communicate that the previous action is
completed and that they are ready to move on:

U: INQUIRY/REQUEST
A: RESPONSE
U: ACKNOWLEDGMENT/ASSESSMENT/LAUGHTER
<OPTIONAL PAUSE>
A: LAST TOPIC CHECK

U: what’s your favourite movie?

A: I guess I like movies with a strong AI lead.
U: ok
(2.0)
A: Anything else?

Each pattern is expandable with other subpatterns or may present different options
according to its conversational structure. Patterns display the same format: an abstract
model of the pattern with generic social actions or intents in capital letters and an
adaptation of the pattern to a particular use-case. Here the user does the first part of
an adjacency pair (an inquiry or a request) successfully granted or answered by the
agent. If the agent did not succeed, the third position would not have been filled with an
acknowledgement but it would have been expanded with a repair initiator, like “what
did you say?” or “define AI”. In this case, the agent does not need to say anything more
after the acknowledgement and, after 2-3 seconds pause in a vocal interaction or 20-30
seconds pause in a textual interface, the agent checks if the user has other requests or
topics.

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The adherence to an Intent-Entity-Context-Response paradigm allow to apply the

language pattern of the NCF to various platforms and use-cases. Specifically, the exam-
ples shown in the textbook are all realized on Watson, but we think that the same pat-
terns could be realized also on other platforms with the same paradigm, like Google’s
Dialogflow. Furthermore Moore and Arar (2019) methodology is primarily focused on
the realization of vocal conversational interaction in English, but we argue that the same
patterns with slight adaptation could be implemented also in textual conversational
interfaces and in other languages, like in Italian.

3. A roadmap towards the implementation

3.1 A possible proposal: a summary roadmap

In this section, we provide a practical-procedural workflow for approaching chatbot

projects based on our work experience in the field and on the most influential textbook
guidelines on this topic (Cohen, Giangola, and Balogh 2004; Pearl 2016; Shevat 2017;
Hall 2018; Dasgupta 2018; McTear 2020). This workflow is made of macro and micro-
levels integrated together and should involve stakeholders from different departments,
considering at least the joint effort of marketing, linguistic design and the technical
development orchestrated by a flexible methodology that opens with the project’s
requirements definition up to the implementation.

Figure 2
Schema for the proposed roadmap.

The stage of project’s requirements definition produces as output the acknowl-

edgement of the feasibility of the conversational agent’s project, the identification of
the potential target users and of the technical requirements the application should
possess. We substantially agree with the procedure proposed in Cohen et al. (2004,
46) that covers three micro-levels: understanding the business, understanding the user,

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technical requirements. There are multiple business issues that need to be understood and
questions to be answered. Answering these questions can provide significant guidance
to also write down metrics for the overall evaluation of the project.
The second element of the requirement phase is the understanding of the popu-
lation of expected target users, which needs to be understood both in terms of char-
acteristics/needs and of usage modality. Cohen et al. (2004, 49) list various elements for
understanding and taking into account the final user’s needs and characteristics.
The second perspective regards how, when, where and why the final users will use
the application (Cohen, Giangola, and Balogh 2004, 50). They suggest also two practical
ways to get these information: a preliminary overview of the various touchpoints of
the company focusing on offered functionalities and transmitted feels, and organizing
meeting with the company. The key attitude to develop to gain this information coin-
cides with the first stage of the Design Thinking process assumed in Moore and Arar
(2019), empathize. Empathy towards the interlocutors to get an understanding of the
business and the users can be obtained through observations of how the final users
currently interact with the industry or resolve the task that will be supplied by the
chatbots, or through the engagement of the people directly involved. From a linguistic
point of view, examples of useful materials to collect and analyze may be emails, call
transcripts, or messagges from the final users to the company.
The third requirement is getting an understanding of the application, focusing on
the technical requirements of it. This stage is a prerogative of the technical department
and its main point is getting an understanding of the application from a technical point
of view, evaluating the feasibility itself and the strategies that need to be elaborated for
solving tasks and subtasks.

The second macro-level point is definition, whose goal is to draw conclusions from
the preliminary analysis of the project’s requirements in order to define user needs
more formally. We identify three elements that have to be defined: goal statements,
user personas and agent personas. With goal statements we mean the definition of key
design criteria learned from the analysis of requirements. They involve the definition of
user goals grouped into broader statements, defined also with respect to the technical,
financial and organizational constraints of the specific project.
The user personas is a fictional representation of the target user: a systematization of
the collected user’s qualities to define a prototype of who will typically interact with
the final product. The user personas should also reflect the users’ pain points, in order
to improve the user journey. From our personal experience in the field, an efficient way
to systematize the users’ pain points is to write them down synthetically and associate
them with benefits that the chatbot could provide in relation to them. An example is
shown in Table 1.
The last element of the second section is the definition of some characteristics of
the agent personas (Hall 2018; Cohen, Giangola, and Balogh 2004; Pearl 2016). In our
experience on the field, we do agree with the synthetical sketch proposed in Moore
and Arar (2019) that splits the agent personas design into three components: agent job
description, agent personality and agent self-knowledge. A starting point for describing the
qualities and the language of an agent, is imagining a job it is supposed to do. What role
is the agent supposed to substitute or replace? Trying to list down duties and activities
the chatbot is intended to assolve and the expected experiences and qualifications, as
if it was a real job candidature, can help to be consistent also in the design itself and
throughout the project. This procedure helps to identify jargon and recurrent technical
terms the chatbot is supposed to manage. The agent personality needs to be characterized

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Table 1
Pain points in the user journey associated with possible chatbot’s benefits.
Pain Points Chatbot benefits
Long waiting time on the phone Instant answer or escalation to an operator

Personalised user journey to the retrieved

Difficult information retrieval information starting with an initial disam-
biguation

Hard understanding of complex Systematisation of information in small slots

and long documents and simplified language

in terms of communicative style, its level of formality and generally the tone of voice
the target users expect to find in the conversational agent they are talking to. Two other
core issues of the agent personality are the assignment of a gender to a chatbot, with
the cultural and social implications that this may bring with, and the opportunity of
humor in it. From our experience on the field, strongly anthropomorphized chatbots
usually do belong to a gender, which most of the time is female (West, Kraut, and Chew
2019). There are also cases of neutral chatbots that reproduce an animal, a vegetable or a
fantasy character. It depends on what kind of character or conception of gender we aim
to reproduce in a virtual reality, being aware of the risk of reproducing virtually biases
or prejudices belonging to the real word (Strengers and Kennedy 2020).
Humor can be an efficient strategy to build trust, especially if used in secondary
responses that do not cover the main topics of the chatbot. Since the users expect
a chatbot to be productive and efficient (Brandtzæg and Følstad 2017, 2018; Piccolo,
Mensio, and Alani 2018; Zamora 2017), humoristic responses rather than informative
ones can be counterproductive and may indeed frustrate the user. On the other hand,
receiving a humoristic answer in an unexpected context such as online conversation
with a machine, can increase the surprise effect and it may induce the users to continue
the conversation (Jain et al. 2018).
Another correlated aspect involved in sketching a chatbot personality is the defini-
tion of some conversational paths that do not constitute the core topics of the chatbots
but they are in some way related to it and can entertain the user. For example, a
customer-service chatbot of an online motorbike clothing may provide an answer for a
question like “What is your favourite motorbike brand?”.3 Another way to reinforce the
users’ confidence towards the agent is working on the agent self-knowledge (Przegalin-
ska et al. 2020; Følstad and Brandtzaeg 2020; Følstad, Nordheim, and Bjørkli 2018). A
conversational agent can not have real perception of itself, but providing conversational
paths that may help the users to navigate the conversational space created by the chatbot
and the chatbot itself can be an efficient way for helping the user understanding what
the chatbot can actually do and say and asking him more pertinent questions. Questions
like this may regard the chatbot itself (“What are you?” “Are you a human?” “What is a

3 Business and commercial constraints have to be considered as well. In this case, the chatbot may not be
able to provide an answer citing a specific brand, and therefore indirectly supporting a brand, but it can
answer with a generic: “In my lonely virtual world I can only ride the wings of fantasy”. Furthermore,
some popular NLU platforms like Dialogflow contain pre-built conversational agents enriched with
small-talks conversational paths covering generic topics such as weather, hour or day of the week.

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chabot?”) or the competences of the chatbot (“What can you do?” “What can I ask you?”
“What do you know’”).

The third step in the proposed methodology is called mock-up & ground truth.
Once the target users and the goal statements have been sketched out, we can move on
to the drafting of the conversational perimeter. This term identifies a sort of table that holds
together the groups of topics managed by the agent, structured in a way that reflects the
Intent-Entity-Context-Response paradigm of the most common NLU platforms. In this
phase, it is important to define the intents coherently and functionally to the goals of
the agent. If conversational data collected during the preliminary phase such as call
phone transcripts or emails are available, we suggest to group them following a bottom-
up labelling approach. This approach consists of first grouping collected utterances into
wide general categories, like “questions”, “problems”, “getting information” and then
proceeds refactoring and splitting the so funded categories into more specific ones,
considering for example the topic of the question, the action required to satisfy it and so
on. Through this procedure we can both identify intents and train them with authentic
linguistic material that constitute the so-called training phrases. A schema of how it
works is shown in Figure 3 representing a schematisation of the reasonings behind
the identification of the topics that will be handled by the agent, but it is not proper
conversational perimeter as we mean it.

Figure 3
Schema of the bottom-up labelling approach for the perimeter design.

The conversational perimeter is the final elaboration of this reasoning. It also

includes a section dedicated to the responses, that should coincide with the actual
responses that the agent gives in chat and has to be updated with new information

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or modifications. Furthermore, it also contains some examples of the training phrases,

utterances that final users can potentially say to formulate a request. Training phrases
are categorized in intents, in turn grouped according to the topic they refer to. A conver-
sational perimeter offers a systematization of the topics handled by the conversational
agent, organized in intents like the platform it will be developed on; and it shows
how simple question-answer exchanges will be managed directly in chat, with some
examples of utterances the final users may produce and the answers they will be
given. Table 2 shows the different section of a conversational perimeter, re-adapting
the utterances from Figure 3 to the final elaboration of the perimeter.

Table 2
A section of a conversational perimeter.
Topic Training phrases Intent Response
Quando consegnate?
Consegniamo tutti i giorni
Posso sapere gli orari di con-
Consegna Consegna_orari della settimana, compresi i
segna?
festivi.
Quando fate la consegna?
Consegnate all’estero? Consegniamo solo in Italia,
Consegna Consegna_estero
Consegnate solo in Italia? non all’estero.
Il costo della consegna è gra-
Consegna Quanto costa la consegna? Consegna_costi tuito per gli utenti registrati
e di 4 euro per gli ospiti.
La consegna non mi è ar-
rivata. Se ritieni che ci sia un
Il pacco è in ritardo. ritardo di consegna, posso
Consegna Devo segnalare una con- Consegna_ritardo inoltrare una segnalazione al
segna in ritardo. servizio clienti, mi basta solo
La mia consegna non si è qualche tuo dato.
verificata.
Posso pagare con carta di
Puoi pagare con paypal,
credito?
Pagamenti Pagamenti_metodi satispay e carta di credito
Posso pagare con satispay?
registrata.
Posso pagare con contanti?
Puoi comprare dal nostro
Mi devo registrare al sito per sito sia come ospite sia come
Pagamenti Pagamenti_account
pagare? utente registrato, a te la
scelta!

We need to consider that a complete conversational perimeter is usually much

bigger than this: it depends on the specific project, but in our experience it can contain
between fifty and one hundred intents. Furthermore, it contains only the simplest
form of interaction: the responses are static, which means that they do not change
dynamically taking information from external sources, but they are always the same,
even though on the most common NLU platforms they can be randomized, that is to
a specific intent can be associated with one or more responses randomly picked-up by
the agent to create conversational variety. The form of the responses should respect the
basic language-specific pragmatic norms, as shown in section 4.
The second micro-level step of the mock-up and ground truth mapping is dedicated
to the dialog strategy, concerned with the effective building of the dialogue. It answers
the question: how will the back and forth between the agent and the final users be?
Will generally the agent start the conversation or the user? If the conversation flow is
supposed to be more complicated than a simple question-answer and it requires the
following of a specific path, we recommend the use of graphical tools for visualising

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the steps of the path we have imagined and possible variations, such as Google Draw
or XMind.
Mock-up transcripts is thought especially for more complex flows, that need more
than one conversational turn to be developed and that may also be represented on
one of the graphical tools mentioned above. In this phase there are two alternatives
that can be pursued. From one side we can simply write down the dialogues we
would like to reproduce with the agent (Cohen et al. (2004) and Pearl (2016) call them
sample dialogues) and read it aloud to see if they sound human before implementing it,
using either programming languages or commercial platforms that allow to concatenate
conversational flows reproducing the characteristics identified by CA mentioned before.
Alternatively, instead of creating the flows from scratch and implementing them, our
proposal considers the Natural Conversation Framework and especially the sequential
patterns proposed by Moore and Arar (2019). The latter approach appears more inno-
vative and more structured, and it is the one we would like to adopt.
The final macro-level step of the roadmap is the concrete realization of the agent
and consequently the effective implementation of the defined flows and selected se-
quential patterns on a NLU platform, on specific chatbot tools or using the most com-
mon programming languages.
After the implementation, a fundamental step before the roll out is testing. Like
McTear (2020) claims, there is still no unified and univocal testing approach, but it
depends on the implementation method behind the agent (Deriu et al. 2020) and on
the project’s requirements that need to be evaluated. Testing has a double function:
to evaluate the efficiency of the developed application and, if possible, to improve
the actual functionalities with a tuning activity. From our experience on the field, we
suggest various test steps before the final roll-out. This allows developers and design-
ers to evaluate the results and, if necessary, to tune some aspects of the application
before the final version. A dialog transversal test (Cohen, Giangola, and Balogh 2004;
Pearl 2016) for evaluating the behaviour of the system in every dialogue state and in
every condition seems very important, trying out some out-of-perimeter utterances to
verify the proper response of the system also in such cases. A fundamental aspect that
needs to be considered in this context, is that a conversational agent is a constantly-in-
progress creature: even though it is finished and especially if it supports a NLU tool, it
needs to be updated with new linguistic materials in order to make the performances
better and better. It has to be seen as an alive creature and project, that is nurtured by
language and, in some way, produces language: therefore, training and maintenance
are continuative activities. There are multiple elements that can be tuned or updated to
make the performance of the chatbot better: the training phrases in natural language,
the responses in case of changings in the information to deliver, new conversational
paths. Table 3 shows a possible evaluation framework taken from our experience on
the field and resulted from the combination of two variables: in/out of perimeter, which is
referred to the coherence of the utterance produced by the user in relation to the conver-
sational perimeter of the conversational agent; and correct/wrong, which is the effective
evaluation of the response given by the conversational agent in that specific context.
From every possible combination of these variables we provide possible improvements
that can be undertaken.

4. Adaptation of the methodology and implementation

After the definition of a theoretical approach rooted in pragmatics and a practical-

computational operating procedure towards the implementation, in this section we

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Table 3
Evaluation grid.
In perimeter Out of perimeter
The user’s utterance is out of perimeter
The user’s utterance is in perimeter and
and the chatbot answers properly acti-
the chatbot answers with the expected
Correct vating the expected fallback intent: no
associated response: no improvements
improvements needed.
needed.
The user’s utterance is in perimeter and The user’s utterance is out of perime-
the chatbot answers wrongly ter and the chatbot doesn’t activate
with a response associated with another the fallback intent,but a response as-
intent. Improvements may be: updating sociated with another intent. Improve-
Wrong the training phrases of the missed in- ments may be: adding more training
tent, verifying the training phrases of phrases to a fallback intent, adding
other intents that may cause training phrases to the missed intent,
miss-match, or modify the response verifying training phrases that may
with more information. have caused miss-match.

expand and enrich the procedural workflow with the implementation of a selection of
patterns on one of the most authoritative NLU commercial platforms also for the Italian
language, namely Google’s Dialogflow (Zubania et al. 2020).
The selection of the patterns has been made according to two criteria: (a) the adap-
tation to a text-based modality of interaction; (b) the suitability to a customer-service
context (Szymanski and Moore 2018).
We elaborate a general customer-service case study on which we transpose a se-
lection of patterns in Italian. This practical section on the implementation aims to
demonstrate the high generalizability of the approach, still considering the language-
specific pragmatic implications in prompt design, and its suitability also to business-
oriented contexts of use.

4.1 General case-study description

The structure of conversation belonging to a customer-service domain is similar to

the more general category of service conversations, i.e. dialogic exchanges in which
a person (in the role of a customer or a citizen) requests services or information and
another person on behalf of an organization or an institution, provides services or
information.
Since the focus of our work is not to build a comprehensive conversational agent
but to demonstrate the effectiveness of our methodology for the design of sequential
flows, we do not dwell on the details of the conversational perimeter of the case-study.
It suffices to say that it is a customer-service chatbot, whose goal is to provide
repetitive information to support customers on the e-commerce of a chain of shops.
It can provide information about typical online-shopping requests, such as deliveries,
expeditions, payments and returns and it manages issues and problems related to the
state of the orders. Customers may own a fidelity card, a card they collect points on to
gain special discounts. Furthermore, customers can register on the website and activate
an online profile with all the details on their customer’s situation. Even though the
main goal of the conversational agent is not to perform complex task, it should be able
to support the final users through the registration process on the website. The chatbot

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handles it through some questions focused on the extraction of data. We can distinguish
between two kinds of data to extract: (a) user’s name and user’s email address are
necessary data to complete the registration process. Without the collection of these data,
the registration can not be performed; (b) the fidelity card number is an optional data.
If the user decides to not provide it or the user does not possess a fidelity card, the
registration process it is not compromised.
The registration process is the interaction that we are going to transpose in Italian
using the NCF pattern and implement on Google’s Dialogflow, in order to demonstrate
the validity and the high generalizability of the presented theoretical and methodologi-
cal approach.

4.2 Pattern selection and transposition

The registration process on the website can be realised basically associating three
patterns of the NCF described in Table 4, namely the pattern A2.6 Open Request
Summary the pattern A2.7 Warrant Request & Refusal and the pattern A2.11 Open
Request Repairs.They all belong the the first group of pattern, conversational activities,
and therefore help to manage what happens inside the boundaries of the conversation
itself.
As shown in the section 2.4, each pattern is made of an abstract model of social
actions in capital letters and an adaptation of the pattern to an hypothetical dialogue.
The pattern A2.6 Open Request Summmary manages requests that need a progressive
level of detail to be satisfied, like a registration process, in which a set of data need
to be collected in order to perform an action or to fill-in a module. The peculiarity of
this pattern is the final summary at line (8), that should allow a user’s confirmation or
modification of the inserted information. The modification can be performed using the
pattern A2.11 Open Request Repairs, which handles repair procedures. The pattern A2.7
Warrant Request & Refusal manages user’s questions concerning a detail request and the
possible refusal of giving a specific data. As described in 4.1, we have both compulsory
and optional data that need to be handled in different way.
In the next section, we explain the pragmatic aspect we take into account for the
transposition into Italian and we then implement them on Google’s Dialogflow.

4.3 Pragmatic aspects for the transposition into Italian

The pragmatic-functionalist perspective adopted in this work emerges both in the turn-
taking sequential structure of the patterns of NCF and in the transposition of the chosen
sequential patterns into the Italian language. The observations made by Cohen et al.
(2004) about prompts design are still actual and rich in ideas, but they are concerned
exclusively with the English language.
In our work these aspects become relevant for the distribution of content in the
Italian transposition of the selected patterns. We are going to transpose patterns from
a language to another, namely from English to Italian, respecting the predominant
tendency of positioning on the left side of the utterance the topic/given information and
the comment/new information on the rest of the sentence. This norm can be violated
for obtaining particular sense-effects and for enlightening a part of an utterance that in a
normal order of the component would instead be positioned at the end of the sentence.
In Italian the most used strategies for producing this effect on a written channel of
communication are the inversion of the normal order of the syntactic components
through focalizations such as dislocations and cleft sentences.

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Table 4
Selected patterns for the transposition into Italian.
Pattern A2.6 Open Request Summary
1 U: PARTIAL REQUEST U: I need to register
2 A: DETAIL REQUEST A: Okay. What’s your name?
3 U: DETAIL U: Dave Bowman.
4 A: DETAIL REQUEST A: What’s your job title?
5 U: DETAIL U: astronaut
A: What is your organiza-
6 A: DETAIL REQUEST
tional affiliation?
7 U: DETAIL U: NASA
A: So Dave Bowman, Astronaut at
8 A: REQUEST SUMMARY
Nasa. Is that correct?
9 U: SUMMARY CONFIRM U: yes
10 A: GRANT A: Ok.
11 U: SEQUENCE CLOSER U: thank you
12 A: RECEIPT A: You’re welcome!
Pattern A2.7 Warrant Request & Refusal
1 A: DETAIL REQUEST A: What’s your job title?
2 U: WARRANT REQUEST U: why do you need to know?
A: Job title enables us to know the
3 A: WARRANT range of professions of our partici-
pants.
4 U: REFUSAL U: none of your business.
A: No problem. What’s your organiza-
5 A: ACKNOWLEDGMENT
tional affiliation?
Pattern A2.11 Open Request Repairs
U: Can you recommend a nearby Mex-
1 U: FULL REQUEST
ican restaurant?
2 A: GRANT A: Mario’s located at Beach and Main.
3 U: REPAIR INITIATOR U: What do you mean?
A: The Mexican Restaurant, Mario’s,
4 A: REPAIR is located at the intersection of Beach
Boulevard and Main Street.
5 U: SEQUENCE CLOSER U: thanks

Another element on which Cohen et al. (2004) dwell on are discourse markers and
their use in prompts’s content design for conversational agents in English, organized
into various classes of use and considered an efficient strategy for enhancing the nat-
ural flow of conversational technology. Without going deeper into the classification of
discourse markers in Italian (among the others Bazzanella (1995) and Berretta (1984)),
it suffice to say that we will take them into consideration for their pragmatic impact
on sentences organizations and structures during the patterns’ transposition. In Italian,
they are indeed significantly important for their interactional function on both sides of
the speakers, their meta-textual function as demarcations, focalizations and riformula-
tions and finally for their cognitive functions (Bazzanella 2008). As Cohen et al. claim, it

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can be that discourse markers are perceived as informal or slang, even though they are
classified as a functional category with no explicit formality degree.
What instead has to do with the level of formality of an utterance and a piece of dis-
course in general (Clark 1996), are register and consistency. Even though the definition of
register is controversial (Bazzanella 2008), we can say it involves the psychological and
social rapports between the speakers, the circumstances in which the communication
takes place and the adopted channel (Halliday 1994). This is one of the dimensions of
variations of language. Other dimensions of variations are determined by the spatial
origins and the geographical distribution of the speakers, by socio-cultural elements
such as level of instruction, age and competences and channel of communication. Espe-
cially in technical or highly specialized work context, the use of jargon is an important
issue to take into account. It is indeed acceptable if all the speakers do share similar
background and analogous competencies in relations to the main content expressed by
the conversational agent we are working on.
The channel of communication is also an issue with significant implications on
the distribution of content and therefore on relation to the drafting of the responses.
Without deepening into the characterization of the language variations adopted in
digital contexts of communication, we have to consider that the variant of language
adopted with a text-based conversational agent is an intermediate solution between the
two opposite poles of written and oral language. This variation takes place in a written
form but it shares important elements with speech (Pistolesi 2018), since it is a type of
writing that considers more the acoustic effect than the visual one.
All these sociolinguistic and pragmatic aspects have to be considered as require-
ments for transposing the selected patterns into Italian. In the next section, we are going
to outline a generic customer-service use-case and in followings there is the effective
realization and transposition of the patterns on Google Dialogflow.

4.4 Implementation on Google’s Dialogflow

We realize the selected NCF patterns on Google’s Dialogflow ES.

The three patterns have been combined together in order to cover multiple
scenarios we may face during a registration process. For doing that, we implemented
fourteen intents on Dialogflow

01_reg_00_registrazione_generico 01_reg_03_registrazione_riepilogo
01_reg_01_giustificazione_nome 01_reg_03_rifiuto_email
01_reg_01_registrazione_carta 01_reg_03_spiegazione_email
01_reg_01_rifiuto_nome 01_reg_04_modifica_dati
01_reg_02_registrazione_email 01_reg_04_riepilogo_corretto
01_reg_02_spiegazione_tessera 01_reg_04_riepilogo_negativo
01_reg_02_tessera_rifiuto 01_reg_05_ringraziamenti

connected together by input and output contexts manually set and we use three system
entities for the parameter extraction: (a) sys.person to extract and memorise the user’s
name, (b) sys.number to extract and memorise the fidelity card’s number and (c) sys.email
to extract and memorise the user’s email.
The opening intent 01_reg_00_registrazione_generico is activated by training phrases
that express the intention of starting a registration process on the website. As Figure 4
displays, the contents’ distribution of the agent’s response follows the topic/comment
order described in 4.3: the first part introduces the registration process already known

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Dall’Acqua and Tamburini Toward a linguistically grounded dialog model for chatbot design

by the user, since he/she asked for it, and prepares the speaker to provide a set of
data. In this case, the user provides the requested data and the user’s name is thus
memorised through the annotation of the training phrases with the sys.person entity
and the extraction of the corresponding parameter.

Figure 4
Realization of the pattern Open Request Summary. (TRANS. U:I would like to register/A:Ok, in
order to register on the site and create your own profile, I must first collect some of your data.
Let’s begin. What’s your name? Write your name and surname/U: Paolo Rossi).

As the pattern A2.7 Warrant Request & Refusal demonstrates, repetitive pat-
terns in a process based on the data extraction, such as the outlined registra-
tion, are users’ requests of warranty and explanation concerning a specific data.
We provided two intents for managing questions about the reasons of request-
ing a name in this context and the refusal of providing it, respectively the in-
tent 01_reg_01_giustificazione_nome and the intent 01_reg_01_rifiuto_nome, both con-
ncted to the hierarchical intent 01_reg_00_registrazione_generico by contexts. The intent
01_reg_01_rifiuto_nome is also subordinated to the 01_reg_01_giustificazione_nome, which
means that after an explanation’s request by the user the chatbot is able to handle also
a refusal of providing the requested data (see Figure 5).
The chatbot’s responses are more extended then the examples provided by Moore
and Arar (2019). This is because we are specifically working on a text-based interface,
which allows us to insert also a bit longer prompt than with only vocal conversational
assistant. As we claimed in Section 4.1, the user’s name is a required information with-
out which the registration process cannot be performed. The conversational agent offers
an alternative to the user, ("Se vuoi, puoi registrarti anche dal vivo, ti basta andare alla cassa
[...]") because we are in a business-oriented context, where the customer satisfaction is
the most important requirement (Gnewuch, Morana, and Maedche 2017). If after the
activation of the intent 01_reg_01_rifiuto_nome the user at the end provides the name,
the registration process can proceed again.
The second data to extract is the fidelity card number, which is not compulsory and
it can be skipped without compromising the registration. Also in this case we have a
good path (Pearl 2016) where the number is immediately provided, and two expanding
intents used to manage clarification’s requests and refusal related to this topic, namely
the intent 01_reg_02_spiegazione_tessera and the intent 01_reg_02_tessera_rifiuto. Since the
fidelity card number is not a sensibile data, instead of a warranty we provide further
explanation about the number (where it is, what it is, why it is requested) and possibility
of managing refusal, especially if determined by incomprehension, impossibility to find
the card or absence of the card (see Figure 6).
In any case, if the fidelity’s card has been provided or not, the registration conver-
sational flows proceeds to the third and last data, the user’s email, which is, like the
name, a compulsory data to complete the registration, and it is therefore handled by the
intents 01_reg_03_rifiuto_email and 01_reg_03_spiegazione_email with training phrases

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Figure 5
Realization of the pattern Warrant Request & Refusal. (TRANS. A:Ok,...same as
before...surname/U:Why is it needed?/A:The name is an essential requirement to start the
registration process. It will be entered in our databases to associate all the information in your
profile uniquely with you. What’s your name?/U:I don’t want to provide it/A:Ok, as you like.
Without your name, however, I cannot help you register. If you want, you can also register live,
just go to the cashier of one of our stores during opening hours and ask for help from one of our
sales staff).

similar to ones dedicated to the name, with the difference that they are annotated with
the sys.email entity.
As displayed in the pattern A2.6 Open Request Summary, after the collection
of data we have a summary of all the provided information memorised through
contexts and reported in the responses of the intent 01_reg_03_registrazione_riepilogo
through coding some specific variables through a specific Dialogflow syntax, as Fig-
ure 7 shows. These are the responses that the conversational agent displays once the
01_reg_03_registrazione_riepilogo is activated by the insertion of an email address. They
contain parameters associated to the data extracted with entities and stored in the
conversational flow through contexts, according to the form: #context-name.parameter-
name. The two responses are chosen randomly from Dialogflow: it means that there is
no certainty that if the user did not provide the fidelity card’s number in the flow the
conversational agent will display the response with “carta fedeltà non fornita”. Our tests
reveal a tendency to choose the appropriate response according to the collected data,
but for more precise result we recommend to customize the response with some code.
In Figure 8 we show how they appear if filled with the corresponding value.
The summary ends with a agent’s request of confirmation before validating the
inserted data. If the user confirms, the data are validated and the sequence can be
closed with a sequence closer and its reception. If the users would like to modify one
of the inserted data, a repair procedure can be started. The repair procedure can pass
through the intermediate intent 01_reg_04_riepilogo_negativo, where the user simply
acknowledges that the proposed summary is not the correct, or it can directly acti-
vate the intent 01_reg_04_modifica_dati, the core-intent of the repair. Figure 9 shows a

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Dall’Acqua and Tamburini Toward a linguistically grounded dialog model for chatbot design

Figure 6
Realization of a slightly modified version of the pattern Warrant Request & Refusal according to
the type of data to extract. (TRANS. A:Perfect, what is your loyalty card code?/U:Which
code?/A:The code can be found on the back of your loyalty card. It is used to uniquely identify
you as our customer and associate the points you have collected so far with in-store purchases to
your online profile. You can write it here in chat/U:I cannot find it/A:I see, it doesn’t matter. You
can update this section of your profile with your loyalty card details at any time. To end the
registration, I need one more data. What is your e-mail address?).

Figure 7
Dialogflow’s syntax for the final recap in the pattern Open Request Summary.

repair procedure with the activation of both the intents 01_reg_04_riepilogo_negativo

and 01_reg_04_modifica_dati.
The repair procedure is handled by the intent 01_reg_04_modifica_dati, connected to
the previous ones by contexts and whose training phrases are annotated with the system
entities used before. The difference here is that the parameters associated to the entities
and extracted from the user’s sentences are saved with another value. The new extracted
value is used in the response with the same #context-name.parameter-name syn-
tax, in order to overwrite the previous value with the new one. The next figures show
the parameter section in Dialogflow and the responses with the extracted parameters.
The prompts are enriched with discourse markers that functionally structure the
progression of the conversational flow ("Va bene", "Ok, quindi", "Ok", "Perfetto","Ottimo,
abbiamo finito").
This demonstration does not expect to exhaust all the possibilities and expansions
that a comprehensive registration process may present. The repair procedure handles
for instance the modification of a single data and we did not focus on the insertion of

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Figure 8
Realization of the pattern Open Request Summary with the two scenarios: in the first conversation
the user provides all the requested data while in the second the users does not provide the
fidelity card number. (TRANS. First Part: A:Ok,...as in Figure 5...surname/U:Anna
Rossi/A:Perfect, what is your loyalty card code?/U:12345/A:OK thanks. Now I need an email
address to forward communications and offers to/U:[email protected]/A:Good, we have
finished. Summarising: ... Is it correct? Second Part: ...same as before... U:/I do not have it/A:I see,
it doesn’t matter. You can update this section of your profile with your loyalty card details at any
time. To end the registration, I need one more data. What is your e-mail
address?/U:[email protected]/A: ...same as before...).

unexpected or wrong-spelled data. The goal of our implementation is to demonstrate

the effectiveness and the validity of an approach, which is supported by an high-level
theoretical method and which is easily transposable into other languages and using
various NLU commercial platforms.

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Dall’Acqua and Tamburini Toward a linguistically grounded dialog model for chatbot design

Figure 9
Realization of the pattern Open Request Summary and Open Request Repairs. (TRANS. The first 7
steps as in previous figures/U:No/A:Ok, which information would you like to change?/U:I would
like to change the email in [email protected]/A:Ok,...same as before.../U: Yes/A:Perfect.
Soon, you will receive a communication to the email address you indicated to complete the
registration/U:Thank you/A:You are welcome!).

5. Conclusions and future directions

We have therefore obtained a formal, highly generalisable procedure for building con-
versational agents. Our procedure is explicitly anchored to Conversation Analysis as au-
thoritative methodological approach for realising sequential exchanges and reproduc-
ing typical features of human conversational interactions. We additionally transposed

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Figure 10
Dialogflow’s syntax and parameters for the realization of the pattern Open Request Repairs.

the patterns in Italian considering the pragmatic implications of the chosen language
and selected a flexible case-study that allows to easily recreate the patterns in multiple
contexts and situations.
The generalisability of the selected patterns is thus subordinated to two main
factors: the cultural implications that may occur in the transposition of the patterns
into another language and the level of complexity of the conversational flows to im-
plement. The problem of the transposition of the pattern deals with the pragmatics of
the language and the cultural expectations related to the customer experience that may
influence the dialogue design as well. As Brandtzaeg and Følstad (2017) claim the search
of productivity in chatbot use is explicitly anchored to Western culture. This aspect
conditions the entire dialogue design, for example in positioning the chatbot scope
within the very first conversational turns, in order to not waste time. In our experience,
the adaptation of the pattern have been made between two rather culturally similar
language, but it might not have been the same with, for example, an oriental culture and
its language. Beyond the strictly linguistic aspects, also the project requirements and the
agent personas definitions are also culturally defined (Ruane, Birhane, and Ventresque
2019; Cardinal, Gonzales, and Rose 2020). The generalisability of the patterns is also de-
termined by the scope of the specific conversational agent that need to be implemented
and by the level of granularity of the conversational flows it should have: the patterns
can been seen as a base model that can be simplified or complicated depending on the
individual needs.
As future directions of our research, we are going to further investigating the
applicability of this approach on the Dialogflow CX version and possibly on other
commercial NLU platforms.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Injenia S.r.l. for supporting this research.

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Dall’Acqua and Tamburini Toward a linguistically grounded dialog model for chatbot design

CRediT author statement; ADA: Conceptualization, Methodology, Validation, Formal

Analysis, Investigation, Writing (Original Draft), Writing (Review & Editing); FT: Con-
ceptualization, Supervision, Project Administration, Writing (Review & Editing), Fund-
ing Acquisition.

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