Rationality, Cooperation and Conversational Implicature

Conversational implicatures are usually described as being licensed by the disobeying or flouting of a Principle of Cooperation. However, the specification of this principle has proved computationally elusive. In this paper we suggest that a more useful concept is rationality. Such a concept can be specified explicitely in planning terms and we argue that speakers perform utterances as part of the optimal plan for their particular communicative goals. Such an assumption can be used by the hearer to infer conversational implicatures implicit in the speaker's utterance.Comment: Presented at the Ninth Irish Conference on Artificial Intelligence (1997

Yes/No Questions and Answers in the Map Task Corpus

We analyze question-answer pairs in a variety of ways, for three different kinds of yes/no questions. We find that the classification of yes/no questions described in (Carletta et al., 1995) for the Edinburgh map task corpus correlates well with whether a response will be a bare yes or no, a yes or no plus additional speech, or just speech without an overt yes or no. Correlation with responses described as “direct” or “indirect” is less good. We also find that the strength of a question’s expectation for a YES response correlates with the move type, the form of the response, and lexical yes choices; and that the move type correlates with the form of the question and with turn-taking schema

Dialogue structure models: an engineering approach to machine analysis and generation of dialogue

The problem area addressed within this research is the processing and understanding of natural English dialogue by computer. The presented work fundamentally constitutes the development of a theory for modelling natural dialogue, and the practical implementation of that theory. There are two major aspects of consideration within the theory: the modelling of dialogue structure is balanced against certain individual factors. The structure of the dialogue is modelled via the mechanism of the Dialogue Structure Models and its constituent parts, accounting for situational context, participant motivation, participant role(s) and other contributory factors. The individual factors, on the other hand, are peculiar to the dialogue currently in progress, and cannot be pre-determined in the way that structure can. These factors include:1. The personal characteristics of the participants (their personalities, backgrounds, interests and belief systems); 2. The overall mood of the participant (how (s)he is feeling today; the emotional state of the participant); 3. Instantiation factors relating to the events and circumstances of the particular dialogue in progress. (For example, how a participant reacts intellectually or emotionally to what the other person has just said).A description of the implementation of this theory is presented, followed by a discussion of the testing techniques used to ensure that the original criteria for success have been met

Conversational Implicatures In Indirect Replies

I interpretation and generation of a kind of particularized conversational implicature occurring in certain indirect replies. Our algorithms make use of discourse expectations, discourse plans, and discourse relations. The algorithms calculate implica- tures of discourse units of one or more sentences. Our approach has several advantages. First, by taking discourse relations into account, it can capture a variety of implicatures not handled before. Second, by treating implicatures of discourse units which may consist of more than one sentence, it avoids the limitations of a sentence-at-a-time approach. Third, by making use of properties of dis- course which have been used in models of other dis- course phenomena, our approach can be integrated with those models. Also, our model permits the same information to be used both in interpretation and generation