  In this paper I describe how miscommunication problems are dealt with in the
spoken language system DIALOGOS. The dialogue module of the system exploits
dialogic expectations in a twofold way: to model what future user utterance
might be about (predictions), and to account how the user's next utterance may
be related to previous ones in the ongoing interaction (pragmatic-based
expectations). The analysis starts from the hypothesis that the occurrence of
miscommunication is concomitant with two pragmatic phenomena: the deviation of
the user from the expected behaviour and the generation of a conversational
implicature. A preliminary evaluation of a large amount of interactions between
subjects and DIALOGOS shows that the system performance is enhanced by the uses
of both predictions and pragmatic-based expectations.
