1 Overview

Our view of miscommunication is that it is just one aspect of the more general phenomena of communication and collaboration. There are a number of complexities to miscommunication, such as what it relates to, who notices and reacts to it and how, which can really only be fully explored within the context of the larger interactive processes One can get a full picture of miscommunication only in contrast to the other issues and alternatives, both alternative interpretations of the communicative state (some of which will be states of miscommunication) and alternative actions that the communicators can take (some of which will be repairs of miscommunication).

We explore grounding and the sub-phenomena of miscommunication and repair from both theoretical and empirical perspectives. In the next section, we outline some of the different aspects of miscommunication from a formal perspective. In Section 3, we discuss work on the larger issue of grounding in task-oriented collaboration. Then in Section 4, we introduce the multi-modal task-oriented domain that we have used to gather data on actual collaboration. In section 5, we give examples of how the framework developed in the theoretical sections can be used to analyze specific instances of the observed collaborative behavior. We conclude with some remarks about the potentially benefits of miscommunication, when seen from a pedagogical perspective.