Chapter 26
Conversation and its Structure
Chapter: Conversation and its Structure, in Daniel Jurafsky and James H. Martin, Speech and Language Processing, 3rd edition draft, August 19, 2026. The source chapter calls itself an initial stub.
Topics to learn
Page numbers refer to the linked chapter PDF.
- Properties of human conversation p. 1
- Turns p. 2
- Speech acts p. 2
- Grounding p. 2
- Subdialogues and dialogue structure p. 3
- Initiative p. 4
- Inference and implicature p. 5
- Annotation resources p. 5
- Dialogue acts p. 5
- Corpora for those acts p. 5
- What this stub does not yet contain p. 1
- A full computational annotation pipeline p. 1
- The later sections the draft says are still to come p. 1
FAQ
Is this chapter a complete dialogue-system design?
No. The draft says it is an initial stub. It introduces conversational structure and points toward annotation. It does not specify a full system.
What is grounding in this chapter?
A speaker signals understanding, or shows that understanding failed, during the conversation. It is not the retrieval-grounding task from the information-retrieval chapter.
What is a dialogue act?
A label for what an utterance is doing in the conversation, such as a question, answer, or confirmation. It is not the same as a syntactic sentence type.
Why does initiative matter?
Participants shift who is driving the task. A system that always waits, or always leads, is implementing a policy. The chapter separates that property from the words alone.