The Need for Referent Identification as a Planned Action

The paper presents evidence that speakers often attempt to get hearers to identify referents as a separate step in the speaker's plan. Many of the communicative acts performed in service of such referent identification steps can be analyzed by extending a plan-based theory of communication for task-oriented dialogues to include an action representing a hearer's identifying the referent of a description — an action that is reasoned about in speakers' and hearers' plans. The phenomenon of addressing referent identification as a separate goal is shown to distinguish telephone from teletype task-oriented dialogues and thus has implications for the design of speech-understanding systems.