Toward Recognizing and Conveying an Attitude of Doubt via Natural Language

This paper addresses the dual problems of recognizing when an agent is expressing an attitude of doubt toward a proposition and of realizing natural language utterances that e ectively convey such doubt It presents naturally occurring examples that illustrate the wide variety of ways in which doubt can be expressed The paper presents a recognition algorithm that uses linguistic contextual and world knowledge to determine that an agent is expressing doubt at a proposition and to identify the proposition that is being doubted It then presents a realization algorithm that uses these knowledge sources to formulate utterances that will convey doubt when an agent cannot accept a proposition due to con ict between it and some other proposition in the agent s knowledge base