

Sudnow, ed., Studies in Social Interaction, New York, NY: The Free Press, pp. (1972), ‘Studies of the routine grounds of everyday activities’, in D. (1992), ‘The quest for the thinking computer’, AI Magazine 13.2, pp. Shafto, ed., How We Know, San Francisco, CA: Harper & Row, pp. (1996), ‘Towards an anatomy of impoliteness’, Journal of Pragmatics 25, pp. (1994), Letter in response to Shieber’s ‘Lessons from a restricted Turing test’ and Loebner’s ‘In response’, Communications of the ACM 37.9, pp. Interaction, and Technology, London, UK: Routledge, pp. Button, ed., Technology in Working Order: Studies of Work. (1993), ‘The Turing test and language skills’, in G. Hoffman, eds., Expertise in Context: Human and Machine, Menlo Park, CA: AAA1 Press, pp. (1997), ‘Rat-tale: Sociology’s contribution to understanding human and machine cognition, in P.J. (1987), Politeness: Some Universals in Language Use, Reissue, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.Ĭollins, H.M. But if the function of Loebner discourse is to encourage the production of software that can pass for human on the level of conversational ability, then the contest designers need to resolve this ambiguity in discourse function, and thus also come to terms with the kind of competence they are trying to measure. This conflict in discourse function is irrelevant so long as the goal of the contest is to ensure that only thinking, human entities pass the test. For example, Loebner discourse is defined 1) as a friendly, casual conversation between two strangers of equal power, and 2) as a one-way transaction in which judges control the conversational floor in an attempt to expose contestants that are not human. In the case of the Loebner Contest, a present day version of the Turing test, the social context of interaction can be interpreted in conflicting ways. But the de-contextualized view ignores the relationship between language and social context, or, to put it another way, the extent to which speakers respond dynamically to variations in discourse function, formality level, social distance/solidarity among participants, and participants’ relative degrees of power and status (Holmes, 1992). According to this view, a machine that passes the test will be able to communicate effectively in a variety of other situations. This paper argues that the Turing test is based on a fixed and de-contextualized view of communicative competence.
