This chapter outlines the application of interactional structures observed by various researchers to the development of artificial
interactive agents. The original work from which these structures are drawn has been carried out by researchers in a range
of fields including anthropology, sociology and social psychology: the ‘local approach’ described in this paper draws particularly
on conversation analysis. We briefly discuss the application of heuristics derived from this work to the development of an
interaction trackingsy stem and, in more detail, discuss the use of this work in the development of an architecture for generating
action for an interactive agent.
For those readers who are familiar with the framework of autopoiesis our definition of interaction might be reminiscent of
the notion of ‘structural coupling’ which de