Rhetorical Control of Semantic Ellipsis in Language Generation for Multi-Party Human-Computer Dialogue

This paper addresses semantic ellipsis control in language generation for humancomputer dialogue. For this, the rhetorical structure of the dialogue is used, as well as a repository of facts that are accepted by the recipient of the utterance. Rhetorical structure is represented in the framework of SDRT, where rhetorical relations are grouped in “confirmation” and “contradiction” relations; the repository of facts that are accepted by the speaker is modelled as a stack containing predicates expressing communicated facts. Starting from these principles, a set of algorithms are proposed. Then, this method is extended to multi-party dialogue and illustrated through several examples. MOTS-CLÉS : génération du langage naturel, dialogue à plusieurs locuteurs, pragmatique, discours, ellipse sémantique.