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ATTRIBUTION OF MUTUAL
UNDERSTANDING
Carl Vogel*INTRODUCTION
This article explores advances in a method of analysis of
conversational interaction, as recorded through text transcripts,
for evidence of grounding in order to quantify certainty of
mutual understanding. It is necessary to take into account
aspects of communication in which certainty of having arrived at
a common understanding of dialogue content must be
pessimistically assessed. It may be that in many or even most
contexts, the urgency of the linguistic elements of
communication is negligible. It is a relatively rare event for
linguistic acts, independently of other forms of communication,
to have a distinctive, measurable, impact on human survival,
and therefore, where such events exist, they tend to be
spectacular.^1 That a failure to achieve mutual understanding does
not typically result in catastrophic events does not constitute
- Computational Linguistics Group, O’Reilly Institute, Trinity College
Dublin, Dublin 2, Ireland ([email protected]). Thanks are due to Lawrence Solan
for organizing the Brooklyn Law School Authorship Attribution Workshop
and his acknowledgement of the breadth of problems that fall into the
category of linguistic attribution in legal contexts. Additionally, I am very
grateful to Carole Chaski for discussions of this material and for making me
aware of the work of Linda Smith.
(^1) See, for example, the discussion of Flying Tiger Flight 66, on
February 19, 1989, in which the air traffic control directive, “descend two
four zero zero” was evidently understood as having a preposition, “to” rather
than a numeral “two,” with the consequence that the aircraft flying at an
altitude of 400 feet crashed into a hill 437 feet above sea level, killing all
four people on the aircraft. STEPHEN CUSHING, FATAL WORDS:
COMMUNICATIONS CLASHES AND AIRCRAFT CRASHES 14 (1994).