This paper is about conversation, or how people talk, and the unit of analysis used to understand the organization of conversation, the turn. It is a product of empirical research and identifies the basic unit of analysis for analyzing and generating natural conversational interaction. It represents a new paradigm, an entirely new way to measure and quantify conversational patterns that are culture, language and gender independent. It is one of a series of papers that will be published. It is the first paper leading up to the development of Natural Conversational Technology. A long list of potential applications will also be published, such as. how to teach intelligent devices to engage in conversational interaction as a human being or how to do opinion mining from dynamic text.
