Grounding and Correcting Commitments in Dialogue

This paper provides a logically precise analysis of grounding and disputes in dialogue. The semantics distinguishes among the public commitments of each dialogue participant, including commitments to relational speech acts or rhetorical relations (e.g., Narration, Explanation, Acknowledgement). Thus commitments to the illocutionary contribution of an utterance as well as to its compositional semantics are modelled, and grounded content is defined to be the shared entailments of all the individuals’ public commitments. We show that this theory of dialogue interpretation predicts in a logically precise manner when an implicature is grounded, and when grounding is implicated. It also provides a consistent interpretation of disputes. And finally, constructing a logical form is decidable, and updating it with the current utterance always involves extending it and not revising it, even if the current utterance denies earlier content.