LINEAR COHERENCE AND RELEVANCE - LOGIC IN COMPUTER HUMAN CONVERSATIONS

This paper describes an examination of computer-human 'conversations' - transcripts of searches for information in a hypertext on violent cr ime and accompanying articulations - for actors' assessments of troubl es. Two classes of troubles exist - those that result from violations of expectations of coherent linear flow and those that result from vio lations of relevance assumptions. These violations are inherent in the se computer programs because of their essential linked-file organizati on, which means that actors commonly traverse links from one topic to another, many times in unanticipated ways, and because information cat egory naming contains etceteras, which may not be mutually acknowledge d. In the process of searching and thereby constructing text in this w ay, actors may start off on seemingly irrelevant paths, but still reac h text segments that they are looking for. The error that occurs is th us a collaborative event, a response to disruption of actors' routine understandings of logic.