In misunderstanding, one participant obtains an interpretation that she believes is complete and correct, but which is, however, not the one that the other speaker intended her to obtain. In non-understanding, a participant either fails to obtain any interpretation at all, or obtains more than one interpretation, with no way to choose among them. In misinterpretation, the most likely interpretation of a participant's utterance suggests that their beliefs about the world are unexpectedly out of alignment with other's. Additionally, misinterpretation can be a source of misunderstanding.
Successful communication requires that participants share considerable knowledge.
For example, they must share some knowledge about the state of their interaction and about the physical and social situation in which they are communicating. As a result, participants must be prepared to handle miscommunication during dialogue. Other systems have attempted to detect misconceptions in the user's model of the domain of discourse. All of these approaches have assumed that the system's model is always correct. More recently, researchers have been looking at detecting and correcting errors in the system's model of an interaction.