The Need to Address Plan Misinference During Dialogues and Why Abduction Might Help

Abstract

ion rename by copy oe rename file Figure 1: An example planning theory Speech act understanding [ Hinkelman, 1990 ] treats different features in the input, such as the mood of a sentence or the presence of a particular lexical item, as manifestations of different speech acts. For example, "please" is a manifestation of a request. The system matches features against the input to determine a set of candidates, which are then filtered on the basis of the consistency of their implicatures (similar to Allen's inference rules) with a model of prior beliefs. [ Traum and Hinkelman, 1992 ] extend this work, generalizing the notion of speech act to conversation acts. These acts include the taking and releasing of turns, and the initiating, clarifying, or acknowledging of an utterance. Unlike speech acts, conversation acts require some positive evidence by the listener before they are accepted as understood. To provide an additional filter on candidate interpretations, the acts have been organiz..