Applying Theories of Communicative Action in Generation Using Logic Programming

One of the most attractive arguments for taking a logical approach to communication, action and knowledge is the prospect of accounting for the ability of agents to perform inference in performing and recognizing communicative actions. In this squib, I illustrate how NLG systems can pose and evaluate logical queries inspired by the work of (Moore, 1985; Morgenstern, 1987; Davis, 1994) to assess the inferential effects of their communicative actions. I have developed a constraint logic programming language DIALUP designed to execute such queries efficiently. Here I will use a multimodal logic with at least three S4 necessity operators: [S], representing the knowledge of the speaker; [A], representing the knowledge of the addressee; and [CP], representing their common knowledge. The eight formal rules governing these modalities, given below,1 represent a reasonable idealization of conversation (see references above and (Clark, 1996) for shared knowledge): [S]p p [A]p p [CP]p p [S]p [S][S]p [A]p [A][A]p [CP]p [CP][CP]p [CP]p [S]p [CP]p [A]p