This article develops an analytical framework to support the analysis of conversations in information seeking contexts. The framework brings together linguistic and sociolinguistic issues such as vocabulary, cohesion, coherence, turn taking, turn allocation, overlaps, gaps, openings, closings, frames, repairs, role specification, and stylistic features. These issues serve as viewpoints for exploring how information-seeking conversations differ from casual conversation and conversations in restricted conversational domains (e.g., teacher-student; physician-patient). A sample of nine conversations from two information seeking contexts (i.e., school library media center, public library) is used to test the utility of the analytical framework and explore possible characteristics of information seeking conversations. The findings support the utility of the framework for various purposes including: training of information specialists, feedback on their performance, design of human-computer dialogues, elicitation of decision making processes during information seeking, and support for natural language processing.

Communication, especially that which is intended to transmit knowledge, is largely a function of written and oral language. This is especially so in situations where the communication is for the purpose of helping one person deal with some information need by communicating with another who is a specialist in information retrieval. This type of situation includes a range of encounters: from that between a patron and librarian at the reference desk where the patron presents some information need (perhaps the location of a book) to the attempt of an information specialist at a help desk to assist a customer get over some software installation problem.

There is much in the way of prescriptive literature that is designed to suggest approaches to the practicing information specialist for eliciting the subject knowledge necessary to relate an information need to a storehouse of knowledge. Most of this literature arrives at rules based on either the authors' experience or the analysis of transcripts or recordings of such interviews. For instance, Taylor (1968) suggests that subject matter, motivation, personal characteristics, and anticipated answers need to be addressed in the conversational process surrounding the identification of the information need.

King (1972) points out the restrictive nature of "closed" questions or those that can be answered with yes or no, which allow the information specialist to shape the request. She suggests that "open" questions encourage information seekers to discuss their needs, giving the specialist a variety of insights that would not result from a yes or no question. Dervin & Dewdney (1986) advocate a neutral questioning approach, which adds unbiasedness to openness in questioning.

White (1981) highlights the importance of interacting dimensions including structure, coherence, pace, and length in influencing the responses obtained from an inquirer. Recognizing that information interviews are characterized by variety in interests and uncertainty regarding the questions that will be asked, White suggests that recognition of these dimensions and their influence on the nature of the responses can aid the information specialist. This is accomplished by programming the interview to encourage the inquirer to provide the knowledge necessary for the specialist to obtain relevant information across the dimensions.

Scarcer is empirical research that describes behavior in information seeking contexts. An example is Ingwersen (1982) who requested librarian participants to "think out loud" while responding to inquirers. He noted a tendency to employ the information seeker's first statement of information need as the basis for an immediate search action. Belkin (1984), using a linguistic coding scheme to classify the functions performed by the participants in presearch interviews, found the results of the interaction to be less than satisfactory primarily because there was insufficient problem description or formulation during the interaction. Eichman (1978, 1982) found the openings of similar information interviews to be very general. He suggests that the inquirer is purposefully being general to first open up the communication channel and then to activate the information specialists' frames of reference by giving a general statement of the problem domain. The empirical picture painted here then is the presentation by the inquirer of a too general statement of their information problem and the lack of effort on the part of information specialists to negotiate a narrower problem description before heading for the storehouse.

Callaghan (1983) describes an information encounter between a librarian and a child that narrows an initial request for a book on maps to an interest in Dungeons and Dragons. It is clear from this example that identification of an information need may lead far afield from an inquirer's initial opening statement. The negotiation process can be a very complex act of communication, where the primary overall achievement is common ground (Clark, 1996). As Taylor (1968) notes: "In this act, one person tries to describe for another person not something he knows, but rather something he does not know" (p. 180). In the process both parties often learn from the experience.

Recognizing that language use, especially verbal communication, is fundamental to this process of negotiating or establishing the common ground necessary to solidify an inquirer's information needs, it appears that a useful investigative approach would involve the study of language use in information seeking contexts. This would involve the analysis of language behavior similar to that performed in, for instance, physician/patient encounters (Frankel, 1984; West, 1984) and teacher/student interaction in the classroom (Mehan, 1979). These analyses have proved useful in identifying the distinctive characteristics of verbal communication in special settings. While such intensive, microanalytic work in information seeking contexts has been very limited (see Eichman, 1978 & 1982; Belkin, 1984; and Brooks & Belkin, 1983), it has shown the potential of such endeavors for understanding and describing language behavior. This understanding of, for instance, conversational strategies, structures, and goals may be used for such diverse purposes as evaluating performance, training information specialists in communication skills, and designing human-computer dialogue approaches.

The purpose of this paper, then, is to investigate the application of various linguistic and sociolinguistic strategies to conversation in information seeking contexts. Two contexts–a school library media center and a public library are employed here. This purpose is achieved first by considering approaches to conversational analysis with the intent of building a framework for orienting the analysis here. This framework is, then, employed in the analysis of conversational data. Finally, implications of such a methodology for research and practice in information science are considered.

There are three areas to be considered in this section of the discussion. First, the promise of linguistically based conversational analysis for considering utterances or verbal language behavior in information seeking contexts. Second, strategies of linguistic analysis of conversational data that may help in describing and understanding utterances in these contexts. Third, conceptualizations that help in integrating specific research findings into a frame of reference. There are certainly other approaches that might be taken. For instance, a more contextual or ethnographic strategy would provide answers that might be otherwise unanswerable (cf. Moerman, 1988; Schiffrin, 1994; Agar, 1996).

Research in Restricted Conversational Domains

The conceptualizations of Schegloff and Sachs (1973), Sachs, Schegloff and Jefferson (1974), and the integrative work by McLaughlin (1984) all emphasize casual discourse. So too do many of the empirical works in the field. For instance, Tannen's (1984) work analyzed discourse that took place among friends at a Thanksgiving dinner. Tannen (1994) considers gender differences in a variety of conversational situations. All of this work has been useful in providing a baseline of how conversation "naturally" occurs.

Yet, other more focused research has shown that there is much to be learned from consideration of discourse in limited or restricted domains. A thread of implication underlies Hoffman's (1984) review of fundamental approaches to the study of language for special purposes (LSP) which indicates that the potential for payoff in the study of texts is greater in restricted domains. Work that has addressed physician/patient, teacher/student, server/ customer, and inquirer/information intermediary contexts has provided insights to the special character of conversation in those domains. The following provides some examples in each of these restricted domains of linguistic behavior that differs from the norm of casual conversation.

Teacher/Student Domain: The norm in casual conversational behavior is the two part adjacency pair where the speaker makes a statement and the hearer responds (Sachs, Schegloff & Jefferson, 1974). Mehan (1979) found that this is not the case in the classroom during lessons. Rather, there is a routinized three part structure to conversational interchanges where the teacher asks a question, the student responds, and the teacher evaluates that response. Further, Mehan noted that the turn allocation mechanisms in a classroom are much more restricted than in casual conversation. Speaker allocation is not open for negotiation at the end of each turn as Sachs and his colleagues suggest is the norm for casual conversation. Rather, the inherent three part conversational structure returns control to the teacher who allocates turns.

Physician/Patient Domain: Frankel (1984, 1990) found that physicians ask questions and patients provide answers with very few exceptions. Also, where overlaps in conversation occurred the patient was the one to drop out of the conversation in the overwhelming majority of cases. Neither the physician nor the patient returned to issues raised by the patient during these overlaps. The obvious result of this verbal behavior is to severely limit the patients' abilities to comment on their health status. West (1984) found that there was significant disparity between physicians' and patients' terminology. Physicians used medical terminology and patients used common words. The observed result was frequent misunderstandings. Many of these were cleared up in subsequent conversation, but often physicians did not note that a misunderstanding had occurred. These breakdowns were primarily the result of the physician not noting a patient's failure to confirm. Both Frankel and West indicated the relatively frequent occurrence of three part conversational structures. Unlike the classroom lesson situation, the third parts were primarily neutral where the physician acknowledges the patient's comment and invites continuation.

Server/Customer Domain: Merrit (1976) and Lindenfeld's (1978) work addresses the domain of service encounters. They found that there was a great deal of presupposition and implication required on the parts of the parties to comprehend what was really being asked. This brief transcript from Merrit (1976) is indicative:

The server responded with a question that implicitly made the assumption that the customer actually did want coffee. The point is that conversation in the service domain has the particular characteristic of minimizing the utterances required by relying on presupposition and implicature–taking the initial question as a request for a cup of coffee.

Inquirer/Information Intermediary Domain: Eichman (1978, 1982) sees correspondence between conversations in information seeking settings and the physician/patient exchange particularly in the question/answer patterning of the interaction. Eichman views the major difference between the two contexts as one of status where the physician does not have to establish a professional relationship and the information specialist does. There is another difference: while the patient recognizes that the physician has specialized subject knowledge, the inquirer in an information seeking situation may have no clear conception of what expertise the information specialist has to contribute.

Eichman's finding that the inquirer's opening questions in information seeking situations only generally represent their real need is important. This finding raises the question of how information specialists respond to such general statements? Research by Ingwersen (1982) and Cochrane (1981), based on the analysis of a small number of transcripts of conversations, indicates that the primary strategy is not conversational, but cognitive. Information specialists often give the inquirer sources that match the information need provided by the inquirer's very general statement of information required. Sometimes the inquirer accepts the source and the conversation is over; sometimes the inquirer further specifies the requirement and the negotiation process continues. Consideration of this issue in a variety of information seeking contexts may give better insights into how linguistic and cognitive behavior work together to enable information transfer.

Grosz (1982) studied the structural differences between task-oriented dialogs and question answering dialogs. She found that the conversation relating to specific tasks paralleled the task procedures. In the question-answering situation she found that the utterances were related locally, but that there was not a structure that tied together the various groups of utterances. Thus, typically there is some cognitive structure (e.g., the structure of the task) that relates the various elements required in responding to requests for information.

The point of all of this is to suggest the value of focusing on a particular context or restricted domain for identifying and describing special language behavior. The discussion now proceeds to a consideration of strategies that may be useful in identifying special aspects of conversation in information seeking contexts.

Analytical Conceptualizations

The following outlines analytical strategies that may be useful in identifying and describing special aspects of conversation in information seeking contexts.

Vocabulary: The identification of a specialized terminology is an important characteristic that differentiates common language and special uses (Hoffman, 1984). The interest is in noting whether words have special meanings in the conversational context.

Cohesion Mechanisms: The concern is the identification of cohesive properties of the conversation that might be useful in differentiating conversational performance. Halliday and Hasan's (1976) work provides an analytical classification of linking mechanisms in a text or discourse. This primarily involves the interpretation of one element in terms of another (e.g., reference or cointerpretation. Substitution, ellipsis, conjunction, and lexical cohesion (repetition and collocation) provide different mechanisms of cohesion

Coherence or Meaning Mechanisms. Halliday and Hasan (1976) also suggest the importance of exophoric (external) reference for coherence of a text or discourse. While cohesion results from endophoric (internal) linkages, it may be that external linkages between a conversation and its context give some insight as to the special nature of conversation in the domain or context. Beaugrande's (1980) notion of intertextuality expresses what happens well: "The immediacy of the communicative situation leads to heavy reliance on INTERTEXTUALITY, the principle whereby the textuality of any one text arises from interaction with other texts. What is ... coherent, and acceptable in conversation may be quite different from what meets those standards in other modes of communication" (p. 242).

Coherence also comes from meaning within a text. Internal meaning arises from lexical semantics, presupposition, implicature, or illocutionary acts (Sanders, 1983). McLaughlin (1984) discusses a number of views of functional analysis of speech acts. In general, these approaches start from Searle's (1969, 1975) notions of speech acts and indirect speech acts and elaborate. The major problem with Searle's notions is that they emphasize the speaker over the hearer and the hearer needs to be explicitly brought into consideration. Recognizing that there are a multitude of approaches for considering speech acts, the analysis here emphasizes the functions that statements serve during a conversation. Questions and requests are expected to be most prevalent.

Internal coherence devices are employed "...to exercise some control of interpretation of specific items, and thus the meaning relations among them" (Sanders, 1983, p. 76). From this, Sanders suggests the strategic nature of coherence devices, such as semantic chaining, to indicate, for example, that a conversation is of a routine nature and to avoid conflicts in interpretation of meaning.

McLaughlin (1984) adds to the notion of coherence by suggesting that it is "...not just a matter of semantic links at the level of individual utterances. Rather it derives from topicality or purpose" (p. 48). Thus, conversational goals and their manifestation, topic, provide another way of considering coherence or meaning relations. As Jacobs & Jackson (1983) note: "Coherent conversation requires that each player's contributions bear a rational relation to some goal . . . part of what it means for an utterance to be coherent [is that]: it ought to have a point" (p. 53). Conversational goals are of three generic types: ideational which communicate knowledge, textual which coordinate ideas with language to produce textuality, and interpersonal which involve the social and psychological needs of people to interact with others (Levy, 1979). Conversation in restricted contexts typically is designed to achieve some ideational (i.e., knowledge transfer) goal. Consequently, the way in which inquirers represent their goals or purposes during a conversation is of interest in information seeking contexts.

Turn Taking: There are a variety of conceptualizations for the structure of turns in conversation. The basic view, on which all other views seem to build, is the notion of adjacency pair (Schegloff & Sachs, 1973; Sachs, Schegloff & Jefferson, 1974) where the speaker's utterance creates a force for the response from the hearer. The suggestion is that the utterances performed during a turn display the performers understanding of the previous turn. The implication is that, by paying attention to the coordinated adjacency pair of utterances, mishearings, misunderstandings, and violations of Grice's (1975) cooperative principle and its maxims of quantity, quality, relation, and manner can be detected. These maxims "...exert powerful controls on expectations, defaults, and preferences in conversation. Their notation is likely to elicit regulative utterances" (Beaugrande, 1980, p. 246). The interesting part of the analysis is to note what linguistic behavior resulted from such extremes.

It has already been noted that in some domains the turn consists not of two, but of three parts. So it is to be expected that there has been some related criticism of the adjacency pair notion. McLaughlin (1984) suggests that "...extensive attention devoted to adjacency pair notion had tended to restrict analysis of conversational coherence to local, utterance to utterance relationships, to the exclusion of more global relations between utterances and the context sets in which they are embedded" (p. 267). Elaboration and broadening of the notion has therefore taken place. For instance, Goffman (1981) has identified certain groups of utterances involving more than one adjacency pair as "ritual interchanges." The existence of these rituals permits explanation of some regularized conversational behavior.

Turn Allocation: Turn allocation patterns vary in some restricted domains. The teacher controls the allocation of turns in the classroom, as does the physician during discussions with patients. It is possible that similar behavior occurs in information seeking concepts.

Overlaps: The way of dealing with conversational overlaps may differentiate information seeking from other contexts. Already discussed were Frankel's (1984) finding that patients relinquished the floor to physicians in the vast majority of overlaps. He suggests that this is a strategy to limit patient participation because the physician usually does not return to the issue raised by the patient. It will be interesting here to see whether such overlaps as exist are cooperative or limiting.

Conversational Gaps: Evaluation of gaps in conversation is culturally dependent. In the United States, there is a definite pressure on the parties in conversation to fill any voids (McLaughlin, 1984). West (1984) noted that gaps were used in the medical setting by a patient to indicate disagreement. Analysis of gaps to identify their conversational function, therefore, may be informative.

Openings. Eichman (1978, 1980) has suggested the importance of openings in information seeking contexts. He notes that the opening speech act can have three kinds of impacts: expressive for communicating an inquirer's attitudes and feelings; phatic for establishing a channel of communication; and informational for transmitting a question or request for information. These impacts correspond to a interpersonal, textual and ideational classification of conversational goals. Berry (1981) suggests that the initiating move in a conversation is of particular import because it transmits information about each of these goals to the hearer. "The opening of an exchange sets up an expectation that turns will be taken until the information has been successfully transmitted" (p. 131).

Closings: In closing conversations the conversational partners in casual conversation often employ a preclosing statement (e.g., OK, right) to test if there are any remaining topics to be covered (Schegloff & Sacks, 1973). If this is the case, some exit routine will often follow (e.g., See you later; Bye). It is expected that behavior similar to casual conversation will occur in information seeking conversations, but that more complex behavior will also be present in some situations. For instance, one party or the other might summarize their understanding of what will be done next in follow up or some possible future action may be specified (cf., Albert & Kessler, 1976).

Frame Activation: Tannen (1984) suggests the importance of frame activation clues in communication: "...no message can be interpreted except by reference to a superordinate message about how the communication is intended" (p. 23). In her study of conversational style based on the informal conversation during a Thanksgiving dinner, she found that such features as intonation, pitch, amplitude, and rhythm served as contextualization cues for recognition of metamessages about which frame was in use. Thus, a comment would be interpreted differently depending on whether a play or irony frame had been signaled. It would be interesting to see if such clues become linguistic rather than paralinguistic in more formal information seeking contexts.

Beaugrande's (1980) idea of "inheritance" might also come into play. This concept raises the issue of a spreading activation of frames, schema, plans, and scripts. It also raises the question of whether different supposed cognitive storage mechanisms find greater use in some contexts than in others. Plans, or scripts, for instance, might be addressed during procedural processes, and frames and schema during conceptual processes.

Repairs. Repairs to mishearings, misunderstandings, or misinterpretations are important mechanisms that need to be addressed in any analysis of conversational behavior (Grimshaw, 1980). In the physician/patient context, West (1984) notes that who?, where?, what?, when?, and huh? are often used by patients to indicate the need for repair. While they are in the form of questions, these expressions differ from questions in that their reference is anaphoric to the previous utterance. McLaughlin (1984) classifies repairs as:

1. Frame repairs when there is a "...lack of relation between an utterance and the topical macrostructure,"
2. Figure repairs where there is uncertainty "...as to how some element or character in the utterance fits into the larger picture," and
3. Focus repairs when "...it is not clear...to which referent some predication attaches" (p. 214).

In information settings repairs resulting from confusion in frame reference would seem to be more likely than the others as exophoric reference to frames is often what gives meaning to the conversation, at least initially.

Role Specification: Eichman (1978, 1980) observes that one of the distinctive aspects of information seeking is the requirement that the information specialist establish a professional relationship with the inquirer. This is something that may not be required in medical, classroom, or job interview contexts, though ten Have (1991) suggests that assymetry in physician-patient interactions is interactionally achieved. In a discussion of an analysis of participant behavior in job interviews, Ragan (1983) points out that "Social or role identities shape conversation, they delineate what kind of conversation the speakers are in" (p. 157). She further suggests that there is a kind of metacommunicative talk--alignment talk--that displays social role: "Through use of alignment talk, actors are presumed to reach definitions of their social situation and to manage their roles in that situation" (p. 158). Consequently, the anonymous information seeking conversations of a public library reference desk might be very different from those at a computer help desk where a client's organizational role is evident.

Ragan identifies various aligning strategies whose presence or absence helps shape to the role orientation within a conversation. For job interviews, she found that interviewers used accounts (explanations of questionable behavior), formulations (summaries) to exert control, metatalk (references to other messages–e.g., clarifications) to focus the conversation, side sequences (ritualized checks on agreement) to insure consensus, and metacommunicative digressions (extended footnotes to the conversation) to elaborate. These all served to control the pace and progress of the interview by the interviewer. Job applicants used accounts to explain, qualifiers to express uncertainty or tentativeness, and "you knows" to emphasize. These all served to explain or justify the applicants' behavior.

Other Stylistic Features: Conversational structure (turn taking), vocabulary, and cohesion and coherence mechanisms all have stylistic implications. There are others that may help in distinguishing linguistic behavior in different contexts: Enthusiasm expressed by quickness of response; type of question including the open versus closed distinction; and pacing including cooperative versus obstructive overlap, timing, and speech rate.

These analytical conceptualizations have been suggested as ways of viewing conversational data to differentiate verbal behavior in information seeking contexts from both casual conversation and conversation in restricted or special contexts. There are other approaches. Sager, Dunworth, and McDonald (1980) is a particularly rich source of approaches for identifying and describing linguistic behavior in special contexts. Also, some of these conceptualizations address a basic concern from different points of view. Given the purpose here of identifying and describing conversational behavior in information seeking contexts, it is useful to test alternative conceptions for their descriptive value.  

Description of the Analysis

The discussion above provides a number of analytical conceptualizations that would seem to be useful in understanding and describing linguistic behavior in information seeking contexts. These conceptualization should also be of use in distinguishing behavior in the variety of information seeking contexts as well as in other contexts. The presentation proceeds first to the specification of research questions that follow from the analytical conceptualizations. The collection and selection of conversational data is then addressed. A summary of the results of the data analysis follows from this. Finally, conclusions and implications are presented.  

Research Questions

The research questions listed here follow from the analytical conceptualizations discussed above.

Vocabulary: Does the use of vocabulary vary from one information seeking environment to another? Does vocabulary use differ across information seeking situations or from behavior observed in casual conversation or other restricted domains (e.g., physician/patient).

Cohesion Mechanisms: Are some mechanisms for cohesion used to a greater extent than others? Are some forms of cohesion not used at all? Is there evidence of unclear or unexplained reference? Are different cohesion mechanisms employed in different contexts?

Coherence or Meaning Mechanisms: To what extent is exophoric reference used to provide meaning to the conversation? Does the conversation vary from the norm of using semantic chaining to provide meaning? To what extent do lexical semantics, presupposition, implicature, or special speech acts contribute to coherence? To what extent are formal statements of conversational goals or topic explicitly included in the conversation?

Turn Taking: Does turn taking deviate from the two pair part? Is the pattern of turn taking influenced by inappropriate second part responses to first part utterances in adjacency pairs?

Turn Allocation: Are turns allocated randomly or does one party control turn taking?

Overlaps: Are overlaps evident in the conversation? Is there any "rule" evident for relinquishing the floor during overlapping situations? Are issues raised by the party relinquishing the floor dealt with later in the conversation or are they dropped from consideration?

Conversational Gaps: Are gaps evident in the conversations? If so, is their presence explicitly explained in the conversation? Are there environmental reasons for their occurrence?

Openings: Are openings general or specific? If general, to what extent is the opening narrowed or negotiated? To what extent do openings provide explicit indications of topic or conversational goal?

Closings: Do closings have a formulaic character or do they serve other functions than channel closing?

Frame Activation: Are frame activation cues evident in the conversation? Is there evidence of inheritance or spreading activation of frames? Do misunderstandings appear to result from mismatch of frames between conversational partners?

Repairs: How is the need for repair signaled? Are some repairs used more frequently than others?

Role Specification: Does either party to the conversation take any action to establish any special role contribution to the conversation?

Other Stylistic Features. Are feelings of enthusiasm, lack of interest, or some other behavior conveyed by any of the parties to the conversation? Are questions asked during the course of the conversation open, closed, or a combination? Is pace a factor (too fast or too slow)? Does the conversation seem drawn out or too limited to deal with the conversational goal?

These questions orient the following analysis.  

Data Selection and Collection

In order to test the power of the analytical framework in investigating research questions of this variety, I decided to collect information-seeking conversations from two different contexts, a school library media center (S) and a public library (PL). Of the conversations recorded, nine–five in the S and four in the PL–are used in this paper. Table 1 provides a topic statement for each of the conversations.

The conversations were audio-recorded as they naturally occurred. The researcher was present and took notes during all recording sessions. Field note taking emphasized the situation and context of the conversations including nonverbal cues.

These recording/observation sessions were defined by the situations: in the school library media center, by the presence of a class for instruction and use of the center, and in the public library by the term of the reference librarian at the reference desk. This was necessary as much of the interpretation of the collected conversations depends on an understanding of previous events or the physical location of the facility. The recordings were transcribed as soon as possible after they were made. Even though the participants were asked if they minded if the conversation was recorded (none objected), there was no evidence verbal or nonverbal that the recording influenced either party. They were simply too busy to notice.  

Excerpts from the transcripts are included in the text here to illustrate various points. Reference to specific conversations is by letter and number.

Vocabulary

The vast majority of the vocabulary was composed of words commonly used in the English language. Each transcript contained some words that could be viewed as being specialized to the domain of the information specialist. These included: index, issue, holdings, card, easy, fiction, reserve, paperback, and hardback. Additionally, each transcript showed the terms that were related to the subject of the inquiry. These included: samurai, chrysanthemum, nightingales, sword, Dracula, Judy Blume, Freckle Juice, anchor, Supreme Court, University of Chicago Press, knob, IRS, Form 1040X, NADA, and Gold Book. All of the terms used appeared to be understood by both parties to the conversations. The frequencies of subject, specialized, and basic terms are given in Table 2.

The percentages were subjected to a nonparametric Randomization Test for Two Independent Samples (Siegel, 1956) to see if there was an indication of difference in the use of subject, special, basic terms in either of the two contexts. Neither this statistical test nor a look at the frequency distribution indicated that the two contexts varied by using one form of vocabulary to a greater extent than another. The use of subject terms, for instance, seemed to be dependent on the topic of the conversation. Length also seems to have an influence. So that S5 (spelling of anchor) and PL4 (used car price guide) had a relatively high percentage of subject terms both because they were shorter and because the topic of the conversation required more subject terms. There is no indication that a specialized technical vocabulary is used either within or across the two contexts. The data do support Grosz's (1982) observation that "... only a small number of words seem to be required for communication in a limited domain" (p. 167).

The ratio of unique words to total words in a conversation is an indicator of the use of unique vocabulary. Table 3 gives this ratio for each of the conversations.

Difference in these ratios for the two contexts raises the question that there may be some contextual difference in the overall use of vocabulary. The nonparametric Randomization Test for Two Independent Samples was applied to these ratios. The test indicated that there was a difference in the ratios obtained from the two contexts at the 95% level of confidence. Given that a relatively low ratio is an indication of specialization in vocabulary, the order of the difference is interesting. The school library setting appears to be using a more specialized vocabulary than the public library branch. Another way of viewing this observation is that the public library conversations used more unique words, while the school conversations used more repetition, possibly to enhance communication with children.

Cohesion Mechanisms

The analysis here attempted to classify each use of a cohesion mechanism by its major form. Items involving reference and lexical cohesion seem to be particularly abundant, but ellipsis, conjunction, and substitution are also evident. A more detailed analysis of cohesive elements by subtypes (see Halliday and Hasan, 1976, p. 333-338, for a detailed summary of cohesion types) might help in differentiating cohesive devices by context. Otherwise, there is no evidence here that cohesive mechanisms differ between contexts or from casual conversation.

Unclear reference is to be expected in conversational situations and it is surprising how little of it there is in the conversational data analyzed here. The focus for unclear reference here is on endophoric reference. For example, in conversation S2 (Maggie Marmelstein), the maze of "its" may provide part of the explanation of a comprehension problem. MS refers to the media specialist in the school library media center; IS to the information seeker.

MS: (To IS2) You still got it! She (IS1) needs it. (points)

MS: (To IS1) You wanna...Did you reserve it?

IS1: No.

MS: You'd better reserve it. OK.

[

IS1: OOK.

[

MS: (To IS2) Come with me.

IS1: I still haven't got it yet.

The reference problem here is compounded by the previous entry (not shown above) of a third party into the conversation. From a more comprehensive point of view, however, this misunderstanding, seems to result from the information seeker's lack of an appropriate frame of reference.

Coherence or Meaning Mechanisms

Exophoric reference. Generally, the first or, perhaps, second statement of each conversation requires the hearer to draw upon some previous knowledge or experience in order to comprehend what the speaker is talking about and then to produce a response. The clearest example of this involves S1 (Sign of the Chrysanthemum), which occurs subsequent to the showing of a filmstrip on the life and works of author Katherine Patterson. The success of this conversation is very much dependent on exophoric or contextual reference to the views shown in the filmstrip. For example, the following utterances from that conversation get much of their meaning by reference to the filmstrip (exophoric references are underlined):

The PL1 conversation includes the following exophoric exchange (S for specialist; IS for information seeker:

S: Why don't you try the Regional Library.

IS: Where's that?

S: It's over near the Courthouse.

Knowledge about the Regional Library was not previously available from the conversation, so that the information specialist's use of that reference presumes some contextual knowledge that the inquirer does not have. When this lack of contextual knowledge became apparent, the specialist tries another external reference. These two examples indicate that contextual reference is likely to be significant in information seeking situations where meaning and consequently language comprehension and production depends on the ability of the parties to the conversation to draw upon knowledge that is not contained in the conversation, but is explicitly referenced. One practical thing that can be learned from these interchanges is that coherence mechanisms such as reference may be major sources for breakdowns in information seeking conversations. This issue will be considered again from the point of view of frame activation below.

Conversational Goals. As expected, the conversational goals of the inquirer are generally expressed in the first or second utterance of the conversation. These goals are exclusively ideational (i.e., communicate knowledge), although textual (i.e., idea coordination) and interpersonal goals must underlie the conversation for it to occur. Each of the inquirers in the data analyzed here came straight to the point with a statement of their interest, topic, or goal. The inquirer's openings, thus, emphasized the purpose of the encounter. Where the information specialist opened, their utterances were purely of a phatic nature and the inquirer responded not with "How are you today? or "Isn`t the weather great?" but with a statement of their purpose.

This use of the opening to quickly get to the point is not the general behavior in casual conversation. Behavior in casual conversation as well as in physician/patient, service, and interview encounters generally begins with some social acknowledgment. The expression of the conversational goal, at least in general terms, therefore may be a characteristic of behavior in information seeking contexts, especially because the parties to the conversation are often strangers. Even where the parties are acquainted, the force of the information need suggests the requirement that direct attention be paid to at least preliminary transmission of information about that need. Consideration of openings in information seeking contexts may add other insights.

Internal Coherence Mechanisms. Meaning derived from the internal structure of the discourse largely derives from the cohesive relations in the text. Semantic chaining (i.e., linking of the objects of concern in the conversation) is the primary means of transmitting this internal meaning. The formal nature of the conversations in public settings seem to limit violations of Grice's cooperative principle and the related maxims. Implicature does take place. Conversation PL1 (Supreme Court Decision), for instance, may be interpreted as delivering subsurface messages:

The inquirer's statement about calling to make sure the issue is available could have well been intended and taken as a request for the information specialist to make the call.

In conversation S5, the inquirer wants the information specialist to spell a word for him:

The information specialist here clearly signals that she is not going to spell the word. The inquirer's "Aaaah" clearly indicates in turn that he got the message!

In conversation S4 the information specialist appears to use a strategy of thinking out loud as a kind of instructional technique.

This sort of strategy is also used at the end of S1 (Sign of the Chrysanthemum) where the information specialist is searching the circulation records for the borrowers of the book.

Remember that these conversation take place in an elementary school setting and one of the information specialist's goals is instruction in the use of the facility. This strategy of keeping the inquirer informed could be useful in other information seeking settings as an explicit coherence mechanism to inform the inquirer about the considerations that are going through the specialist's mind as she or he tries to deal with the information need.

Turn Taking

The conversations appear to be governed primarily by a two-part turn taking system. However, in conversation S5, which has an instructional character to it, there is evidence of the three part pair common in classroom lesson situations.

There is also evidence of the use of the three pair part in PL2 where the inquirer requests instruction in using the microfiche reader.

Drawing from this evidence it appears that information seeking conversations which involve training or instruction may use a three pair part structure. Otherwise the two pair part is the norm in these conversations.

Turn Allocation

Behavior here was unlike casual conversation and like other restricted conversational domains in that one party to the conversation, the information specialist, seemed to control the allocation of turns. This was particularly evident in the public library setting where the inquirers seemed reticent to question the information specialist in situations where it was not at all evident what she was up to. In the school library setting, inquirers were much more willing to interrupt and indicate lack of comprehension. Still the information specialist exerted obvious control where much of the conversational participation of the inquirers involved acknowledgements ("uh huh," "yeah," shrugs, and the like).

Overlaps

There is no obvious explanation to account for the observation that there were no overlaps in the public library setting except that inquirer behavior was very formal. In the school conversations there were a significant number of overlaps. In some of the cases the overlaps were simply acknowledgments that did not need further attention and did not influence the flow of the conversation. In others the overlaps were a clear indication that there was some point being missed. In these situations the information specialist dealt with the problem as soon as possible. In conversation S1, the information specialist has established that the inquirer is seeking a particular book. Once the identification is complete, the specialist attempts to get the inquirer to fill out a reserve form:

The specialist picks up on the student's "U'm late...," understands the external reference to an assignment and begins to try and find a copy of the book. Later on in this same conversation another significant overlap occurs:

It is hard to say what picture the information specialist receives when the little voice says: "If he has it, can I take it from him?," but there is a definite impression that she does not want the inquirer to grab the book out of the other student's hand.

In summary, the overlaps that occurred in the school data either provided acknowledgments without disruption or offered statements of importance to the conversation. Overlaps are not used here, as in the medical context, to limit conversation as the inquirer initiated them. Matters addressed by overlaps were either considered immediately or as soon as possible.

Conversational Gaps

Gaps frequently occurred in the data. For the most part they represent periods of time when a source is being consulted, cards are being checked, or there is movement from one place to another. With one notable exception there were no unexplained silences. This exception is at the beginning of conversation PL1:

That the information specialist would not respond verbally to the inquirer's utterance seems odd. Yet there was no behavior on the part of the inquirer--verbal or nonverbal--that indicated that she felt the lack of response to be unusual. She just calmly stood and waited. Gaps are sometimes used to indicate a lack of agreement. In the corpus here, there is no reason to believe that conversational gaps are anything more than a natural occurrence, arising from the task activities associated with the conversation and the conversational style of the information specialist.

Openings

It has already been suggested that openings in the information seeking contexts investigated here are used to display goals or topics. The focus turns to the level of generality of openings and the extent to which general openings, if they exist, are narrowed. The Table 4 summarizes the openings and classifies them as general or specific.

Where a specific topic was given in the opening the information specialist was able to proceed with minimal questioning to deal with the expressed need of the inquirer. In the general situation there were two generic responses: the specialist recognized the question or request as being general and began to narrow or specify the problem, or the specialist took the request or question to be specific and began to respond on that basis alone.

Narrowing Strategies. S1 (Sign of the Chrysanthemum) and S3 (Dracula) both showed narrowing behavior on the part of the information specialist. Taking S1 first, the specialist first indicated that the information conveyed by the opening was insufficient by implicitly asking for a subject statement. Based on the inquirer's response, the information specialist tried to identify the book by offering a description of a picture that appeared in a filmstrip that was seen prior to the conversation. There is some hemming and hawing along the way, but the desired book is clearly specified at the end of the opening.

In WFS3 a look and a verbal response that asks if the child is referring to a book follow the student's request for the location of Dracula. The inquirer indicates that he is referring to the book. This is not the end. As the specialist is looking for the book or evidence of its being in circulation, the student finally indicates his real intention: he knows the book is out and he wants to get it when it is returned.

PL1 (Supreme Court), PL2 (Microfiche Reader), and PL3 (IRS) are examples of the situation where a general request is taken as a specific example. In PL2 the specialist responds to the inquirer's request by indicating that yes the microfiche contains author, title, and subject information to realize from the inquirer's response that what he really wants to know is how it works. Here fortunately the interaction of the conversation clarifies the information need.

The situation is different in the other two conversations. In PL1 there is no attempt on the part of the specialist to try and find out specifically what the subject of the decision was nor if the inquirer has any additional information to specify the decision. There is no attempt either to see if the inquirer truly is interest in one decision or a series of related decisions. In PL3 there is no attempt to see if the inquirer has some specific question to be answered. Even when the inquirer indicates later on in the conversation that it is "a petty little thing," the specialist does not follow up to try and elicit more details. Both conversations seem to fail from an information seeking perspective. They involved a considerable amount of time without identifying the inquirer's information need; time that might have been spent in negotiation.

It is interesting that conversational strategies were used in the school situation to arrive at a specific notion of information needs, while in the public library there was no real attempt to negotiate or narrow the topic.

It should be noted that even for those situations where the opening request was classified as specific, this may not in fact be the case. The request for the NADA Book for older cars (PL4) could very well mask a more specific or even a somewhat different information need. Strategies discussed above for dealing with general questions by narrowing or by asking if the inquirer has had previous experience with a source may help identify these not so specific questions and requests. From the standpoint of the selection of methods to study such conversations, the possibility that a specific question serves as a mask for something else suggests the need to combine discourse analysis with other methods (e.g., interviewing, document analysis) that could provide details of organizational policies and questioner interest. In all of this it is important to keep in mind too that information-seeking interactions may modify the information seekers' understanding and consequently their needs.

Closings. Table 5 summarizes conversational closings. There is a mix of the formulaic checking for additional topics and some closing action. There were none of the polite "see you later" or "have a nice day" closings. Checking for additional topics was more frequent in the school library media center (four out of five) that the public library (one out of four). When the conversation ends with some action, the action flows out of the previous set of exchanges.

Frame Activation. The analysis differentiates between frames or schema that are used cognitively to represent knowledge and plans and scripts which are used cognitively to give a procedural orientation to behavior.

Frames and schema for knowledge representation. The openings analysis applies here because it shows that communication in these conversations begins by trying to transmit an information need that relates externally to some knowledge base. The opening statement, which transmits conversational goals and topics, is necessary for activating an information specialist's knowledge structures. It is the basis for linguistic as well as cognitive action necessary to comprehend and produce language.

The notion of spreading activation is particularly evident in the opening of S1 (Sign of the Chrysanthemum) where there is cognitive movement from a frame that indicates the material is included in a filmstrip to other knowledge about the subject of the filmstrip. Thus, the concept of samurai may be used to activate other frames dealing with Japanese history and culture and also to focus the initial frame on one or two aspects of the filmstrip. These frames are used to evaluate the views included in these frames and to suggest an appropriate title: Sign of the Chrysanthemum.

Plans and scripts for guiding behavior. Plans or scripts can be used as tools of language production and task oriented behavior. In all but one of the school conversations, the media specialist repeatedly played out what appeared to be a script or plan. The following excerpt from S3 (Dracula) is indicative:

The routine of suggesting that the student reserve the book, the instructions for filling out the form including the specialist doing author and title and the student entering name and room number is repeated in each of these dialogues. Similarly, the routine of checking the circulation file seems to be a script that is frequently used by the media specialist.

Repairs. The repairs are summarized in Table 6. They have all been previously considered from other points of view.

The question of misunderstanding resulting from lack of congruence between the information seekers' and specialists' frames is difficult to evaluate. From a conceptual point of view, it is possible to explain failures in recognizing the generality of goal or topic statements by lack of congruence of frames. It is, therefore, interesting that the repairs noted in the transcripts appear to display differences in what could be called frames. It is also interesting that figure and focus repairs are not evident in this data.

Role Specification

The information specialists in these conversations do seem to use conversational devices to establish their roles and to align the conversations. Much of this role specification comes from their knowledge of sources and the strategies that they use to find answers or identify sources when a quick answer is not ready in their minds. For instance, the media specialist repeatedly talks about her search process as she moves through it. The reference librarian often does the opposite, using silence as her tool so that she can focus her attention on the search process. While there may well be something about the difference in institutions that encourages such variance in behavior, difference in conversational style also contribute.

Other Stylistic Features

Stylistic features like the enthusiasm and interest of the information specialist, and the pace and length of the encounter seem to vary considerably in the two settings. In the school setting the specialist showed interest and enthusiasm in helping students find what they were looking for. There was a certain rush to the happenings there, but that was more a pressure brought about by the presence of 20 or so information seekers than anything present in the specialist's verbal behavior. For example, the media specialist almost ran during pauses in the conversation required to move from one part of the library to another. Length was that required to take the conversation to its completion.

In the public library setting the feeling was very different. The information specialists did nothing to show that they were particularly interested in helping the inquirers. There were no statements like those used by the school media specialist (e.g., "I take it this is really a good book?") to show interest. Pace was slow and the conversations appeared to be longer and more drawn out than they needed to be. Yet, there was no certainty that the inquirer's information need had been satisfied. Again these stylistic findings may be the result of individual rather than contextual characteristics.  

Because of the nature of the data and limited sample, the analytical findings presented above are tentative and are not intended as generalizations. Some of the findings do conform to the findings of other researchers and, consequently, add validity to their work.

The findings regarding the lack of a specialized vocabulary seem to suggest that there is not a special language that is used in either of the contexts investigated here. The conclusion might be different in a special library, information center or other specialized technical information transfer setting. There is some evidence that there is variation in linguistic behavior in restricted conversational domains.

Perhaps the most important result of this work is the application of a multifaceted analysis of conversational behavior in information seeking contexts. The empirical research in conversational and discourse analysis has tended to emphasize casual conversation. Even in research that has looked at conversational behavior in restricted domains, the work has emphasized particular analytical conceptualizations and failed to broadly determine the influence of context on the conversation. Even so the analytical conceptualizations that served as the basis of the analysis here need to be refined, elaborated, and added to.

The most limiting aspect of this research and future research like it is brought about by the characteristics of linguistic data. Its very richness leads to the ability to deal with only a very small sample of conversational data at a time. There is no reason to expect that these problems of data analysis will lessen in the future although computer assisted analysis methods may help.

From the standpoint of future research directions, I have continued to collect conversations from a variety of information-seeking contexts to provide a basis for understanding and describing situations and strategies where successful information transfer is accomplished and where breakdowns occur. This sort of knowledge should prove useful in a variety of applications in the information sciences. These are discussed in the concluding section of this paper.  

It is the purpose here to consider how research on conversations in information seeking contexts might advance the ability of information specialists to deal with problems of communication. The following highlights potential applications of such analyses.

Training of Information Specialists

Descriptive conversational analysis can be used to point out strategies that are particularly effective in the negotiation or information transfer process. By extension other strategies that seem to have negative impacts could also be identified and highlighted.

Evaluate the Performance of Information Specialists

White (1983) notes the absence of efforts to relate information transfer conversations, specifically reference interviews, to retrieval performance. A linguistic approach may help counter some of her criticisms of conventional interview analysis methods. Performance appraisal based on linguistic analysis of information transfer conversations would provide both supervisor and staff member with specific indications of success or failure. The primary advantage of the approach would be that the identification of communication breakdowns in itself would serve as specific feedback regarding areas that need attention. These areas for improvement could include both communication strategies and knowledge requirements for the job.

Interview PL3 (IRS), for instance, could be used to suggest the importance of narrowing down the subject domain as a communication strategy as well as to suggest the possible need for some training in income tax issues. Interview PL1 (Supreme Court Decisions) could be used to point out to the information specialist involved that she never did even raise the issue of what specifically the inquirer's interests were. It also could be used to point out the importance of keeping the inquirer informed about what is going on.

Design of Human-Computer Dialogues to Promote Successful Interaction

Knowledge of conversational structures, strategies, and goals, for instance, can be used to design more hospitable human-computer interfaces. It seems that the analytical framework employed in this study might be helpful in the analysis and design of computer mediated communication. By understanding the problems that people face in interacting through conversation with other people, we may be able to avoid those problems in computer mediated or supported interactions.

Elicit Decision Making Processes for Systems Design

An interesting problem in the design of information systems is the identification of decision making or problem solving processes. These processes include decision rules and heuristics, information used to support decision making, and the processing required to put the information in the form needed by the decision maker.

Translation of Natural Language Into Machine Representations

Grosz's (1982) work is indicative of the benefits of discourse analysis for natural language processing especially where the research and application focuses on a restricted context or domain of language use (e.g., task oriented and question answering dialogs). Kaplan's (1981) work points out the need for sensitivity in natural language systems to misconceptions on the part of the user by providing responses that point out these misconceptions. His linguistic analysis points to the need to differentiate language driven inference from domain driven inference in considering the appropriateness of responses to questions.

These and other studies provide significant insights. Yet this work is only scratching the surface of the natural language recognition problem. Linguistic analysis of conversational behavior in a variety of domains of interest may help to paint a picture of the subtle variations of language in use that natural language processors need to capture.

The range of potential applications of conversational analysis in the information sciences is exciting. Yet the nature of linguistic data, the problems of its collection, and the difficulties of analyzing sufficient data for statistical models present both real problems and challenges.