Suhtlusruum ja selle modelleerimine

"Communicative space and its modeling" Communication between people can take various forms depending on a lot of circumstances – participants’ individual characteristics, their social roles, subject of conversation, etc. The paper introduces a work in progress on modelling one aspect of natural human communication – communicative space. Communicative space is a mental space where a communication participant places himself/herself with respect to other ones and where (s)he is ‘moving’ during a communication event. Communicative space can be characterized by different features, e.g., (social) closeness of a communication participant with the partner, collaboration, politeness, etc. These features of communication can be conveyed by language use as well as by different nonverbal means (body movement, facial expressions, etc.). The values +1, 0, and –1 are used for the coordinates in communicative space. Examples of human-human dialogues – both everyday and institutional – demonstrate how participants pass different points in communicative space during a conversation. The further aim is to include such a model of communicative space in an experimental system for modelling conversational agents in order to make interaction with the system more human-like.