The repair of speech act misunderstandings by abductive inference. McRoy, S. & Hirst, G. Computational linguistics, 21(4):435–478, December, 1995. abstract bibtex During a conversation, agents can easily come to have different beliefs about the meaning or discourse role of some utterance. Participants normally rely on their expectations to determine whether the conversation is proceeding smoothly: if nothing unusual is detected, then understanding is presumed to occur. Conversely, when an agent says something that is inconsistent with another's expectations, then the other agent may change her interpretation of an earlier turn and direct her response to the reinterpretation, accomplishing what is known as a fourth-turn repair.
Here we describe an abductive account of the interpretation of speech acts and the repair of speech act misunderstandings. Our discussion considers the kinds of information that participants use to interpret an utterance, even if it is inconsistent with their beliefs. It also considers the information used to design repairs. We describe a mapping between the utterance-level forms (semantics) and discourse-level acts (pragmatics), and a relation between the discourse acts and the beliefs and intentions that they express. We specify for each discourse act, the acts that might be expected, if the hearer has understood the speaker correctly. We also describe our account of belief and intention, distinguishing the beliefs agents actually have from the ones they act as if they have when they perform a discourse act. To support repair, we model how misunderstandings can lead to unexpected actions and utterances and describe the processes of interpretation and repair. To illustrate the approach, we show how it accounts for an example repair.
@Article{ mcroy1,
author = {Susan McRoy and Graeme Hirst},
title = {The repair of speech act misunderstandings by abductive
inference},
journal = {Computational linguistics},
volume = {21},
number = {4},
month = {December},
year = {1995},
pages = {435--478},
abstract = {<P>During a conversation, agents can easily come to have
different beliefs about the meaning or discourse role of
some utterance. Participants normally rely on their
expectations to determine whether the conversation is
proceeding smoothly: if nothing unusual is detected, then
understanding is presumed to occur. Conversely, when an
agent says something that is inconsistent with another's
expectations, then the other agent may change her
interpretation of an earlier turn and direct her response
to the reinterpretation, accomplishing what is known as a
<I>fourth-turn</I> repair.</p> <P>Here we describe an
abductive account of the interpretation of speech acts and
the repair of speech act misunderstandings. Our discussion
considers the kinds of information that participants use to
interpret an utterance, even if it is inconsistent with
their beliefs. It also considers the information used to
design repairs. We describe a mapping between the
utterance-level forms (semantics) and discourse-level acts
(pragmatics), and a relation between the discourse acts and
the beliefs and intentions that they express. We specify
for each discourse act, the acts that might be expected, if
the hearer has understood the speaker correctly. We also
describe our account of belief and intention,
distinguishing the beliefs agents actually have from the
ones they act as if they have when they perform a discourse
act. To support repair, we model how misunderstandings can
lead to unexpected actions and utterances and describe the
processes of interpretation and repair. To illustrate the
approach, we show how it accounts for an example
repair.</p>},
download = {http://ftp.cs.toronto.edu/pub/gh/McRoy+Hirst-95.pdf}
}
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