Consensus-Building Interation in Consultation Conversations

Abstract

Conversations in business plan consultation sessions were analyzed in terms of the concern-alignment model of consensus-building dialogues. The concern-alignment model stipulates a set of high-level dialogue acts for proposals and concerns, and dialogue structures in consultation conversations were described as joint exploration in the space of possible concerns to seek optimal business plans through consultation sessions. A focus of this report is to examine variations in manual coding across annotators and devise a method to ensure reliability of concern annotations.