Influence of Conversational Coherency of Email Communication in Successful Cooperative Soft.pdfVIP

In uence of Conversational Coherency of Email Communication in Successful Co op erative Software Development Hiroyuki Murakoshi y Koichiro Ochimizu y yScho ol of Information Science Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Hokuriku 1-1, Asahidai, Tatsunokuchi-machi, Nomi-gun, Ishikawa 923-1292, Japan Phone: +81-761-51-1699 (ex.1363) Fax: +81-761-51-1360 email: fmurakosi,ochimizu g@jaist.ac.jp Abstract During sp ecication development pro cess, quality of communication b etween several workers in uences quality of software pro ducts. In this pap er, we fo cus on electronic mail(email) com- munication, which is often used for a co op erative software development. Esp ecially we analyzed conversational coherence which is a sp ecially related sequence b etween utterances. Utterances in the sequence is connected not by words of utterance, but by referring to the preceding context and inferring sp eakers intention. In coherent conversation, a listener can couple the current ut- terance with the p ortion of the preceding utterances or the context. If conversational coherence is not established and maintained, the listener might misunderstand the sp eakers intention and resp ond referring to the inappropriate relev ance, so that the conversation might not b e always completed. It would b e not easy to establish and maintain conversational coherence using email. So we prop ose the measure for evaluating conversational coherency using email. And we analyze the relationship b etween it and completeness of delib eration to examine usefulness of it. Finally we show the in uence of conversational coherency, caused by the existence of implicit versions of