The Winograd & Flores Approach
One of the most important applications of the Speech-Act Theory in computer systems was “The Coordinator” by Winograd & Flores (FLORES, GRAVES, HARTFIELD & WINOGRAD, 1988). They were based on the study of the recurrent use of language acts inside organizations, with the intention of building a standard structure for action-oriented conversations, that means, conversations which goal is to do something (a job for example).Following Winograd & Flores, inside a organization, executives are part of a conversation network and the organization itself is concerned with maintaining this network. When a conversation has not got a happy end, it is because there was a breakdown, a failure in the communication structure. For them, design is concerned with breakdown anticipation.
The next figure shows us the structure for action-oriented conversations. Lines represent actions and circles represents conversation’s states. A start the conversation making a request to B. In the state two, there are five possibilities for B: he (she) could accept, reject or negotiate a change on the initial conditions; Other two possibilities could be chosen by A: to cancel the request or to negotiate a change on the initial conditions. Following the normal course of the conversation, at the end (state five, seven, eight and nine), the actors will have a happy end. It is easy to notice that all the acts are linguistic acts and like a protocol, the acts have been conditioned by their antecessors. For example, any commitment act is followed by an assertive one.
Fig. 1. A Winograd-Flores Structure for Action-Oriented Conversations based in a taxonomy of linguistic acts.
The structure showed in the Fig. 1, was obtained with the aid of Speech
Act Theory, by the study and systematization of the regularities that appears
as relevant to an act model along the time. To Winograd-Flores, this structure
represents the network of constitutive linguistic acts of action-oriented
conversations.
Even the Winograd-Flores’s approach is very flexible, the use of action-oriented
conversation structure was very criticized in the past, because many people
felt a little confused when they were forced to identify an act inside
the coordinator taxonomy. The principal activities that were not considered
by the structure were the possibilities-oriented conversations, a variant
of the first structure.
