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Focusing in Dialog

Paper · 1978 · Barbara J. Grosz

Summary

Grosz argues that conversation partners attend to only a small, shifting part of what they jointly know. She calls this active, participant-driven process focusing. It covers which entities are highlighted and the perspective from which each one is viewed. The paper examines how focusing shapes the production and interpretation of definite descriptions, and what this means for computer systems that understand dialog.

The analysis draws on a corpus of task-oriented dialogs from Grosz (1977) and Deutsch (1974). In these sessions an expert guides an apprentice through disassembling an air compressor, under conditions that simulate person–computer interaction. One fragment shows that a phrase like "the screw" does not pick out the most recently mentioned matching object. It picks out an object relevant to the part of the task currently in focus.

Grosz identifies two kinds of cues for focus shifts:

  • Task and domain structure: the dialog's structure mirrors the structure of the task.
  • Linguistic signals: for example, a contrastive "but".

She then outlines focusing mechanisms in an SRI dialog-understanding system and lists open problems. The work matters because it laid early foundations for computational models of discourse focus and reference resolution.

Key points

  • Focusing is defined as participants actively highlighting a subset of their shared reality. It always involves an implicit actor and also includes the perspective on each entity, such as viewing one event as a selling, a buying, or a trading.
  • The data are task-oriented expert–apprentice dialogs about air compressor disassembly (Grosz 1977; Deutsch 1974), often collected with limited visual contact between the participants.
  • In the flywheel/wheelpuller example, the earlier setscrews are the most recently mentioned screws. They are still excluded as referents for "the screw" because the task focus has moved on.
  • Recency alone is insufficient for resolving definite descriptions. Domain/task structure and linguistic cues such as "but" guide focus shifts.
  • The work was carried out at the SRI International AI Center, with support from NSF Grant MCS 76-22004 and ARPA contract N00039-78-C-0060.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🔬SRI InternationalMenlo Park · United States23 works · 7,208 citations

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 4The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Computer Science · 16,667 worksArtificial Intelligence · 16,194 worksArts and Humanities · 16,039 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 15,891 works

🧭 Topics 1Research subjects and languages the work is about.Dialogue systems · 624 works

Cite

Cite as Barbara J. Grosz. 1978. Focusing in Dialog. Computational Linguistics.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

@article{grosz1978focusing,
  title = {{Focusing in Dialog}},
  author = {Barbara J. Grosz},
  journal = {Computational Linguistics},
  year = {1978},
  doi = {10.3115/980262.980278},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.3115/980262.980278}
}

References

10 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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