Imperfect communication between information requestors and information providers: the effects of syntactic and extraneous ambiguity

Managerial end users are often required to compose queries from information requests posed by managers or external parties. These information requests are usually composed in natural language and, as such, they often contain ambiguities. Two common forms of ambiguity in everyday business communications are extraneous and syntactic ambiguity. This research examines the effects that these two types of ambiguity have on query developers' effort and effectiveness. The results indicate that the presence of syntactic ambiguity significantly increased the number of query composition errors and decreased the query developers' confidence in the accuracy of their queries. The inclusion of extraneous ambiguity did not have a statistically significant effect on the number of errors or on the query developers' confidence. Compared to syntactic ambiguity only, the presence of both syntactic and extraneous ambiguity in the same information request did not increase the number of query errors or decrease the query developers' confidence. The inclusion of both types of ambiguity simultaneously did, however, increase the amount of time taken to prepare a query.