Table 2: Users’ strategies for self-repair
Table 2 shows a clear hierarchy of repair strategies favoured by users: users most frequently rephrase their original turn, but this is closely followed by accommodation strategies in which users use a prompt provided by the bot in a previous turn. Other strategies include users changing their original choices, presumably in the hope that a new choice will be understood, restating the purpose of their original request and repeating the original turn.
Step 4: The final stage of the analysis centred upon classification of bot responses following user self-repair. The purpose of this analysis was to identify how successful users’ repair strategies were leading to progress within the conversation. The bot’s follow-up turns were coded against Følstad & Taylor’s (2021)’s qualitative framework for the analysis of chatbots, to which a fifth category of ‘no response’ was added (Table 3):