Alane Suhr: The Cooperative Testing Initiative

Real human conversation is messy and flexible, and its dynamics are influenced by interaction design. In this talk, I describe a new corpus of goal-directed conversations between human players of the cooperative 3D puzzle game, Portal 2. I first sketch the design space of goal-directed interactions, then outline a number of complex phenomena that arise in real human conversations, including not only whether and how might modern language technologies handle such phenomena, but also how they could learn from the phenomena as they naturally arise in interaction. Finally, I provide an overview of open questions in designing systems that really use language, and some philosophies in addressing them.