Pragmatics and Dialogue Term Paper 2010/11 185.054 Seminar aus AI

This work follows mainly the ideas as well as the structure of Leech and Weisser’s article “Pragmatics and Dialogue”, Chapter 7 in “The Oxford Handbook of Computational Linguistics” [Leech and Weisser, 2003]. First of all we will clarify what pragmatics is all about and on which philosophical and linguistic concepts it is founded. In particular we will consider speech acts and other concepts that are of great importance in computational linguistics and are most relevant to the development of spoken dialogue systems. Furthermore, we will picture out the principal architecture of such systems, their prospective application to real world challenges, and the means to manage dialogues together with a current approach to standardize dialogues between human beings and computers. 1 What is Pragmatics? Pragmatics began to constitute itself as an important subdiscipline of linguistics in the late 1960s and has since gained considerable attention not only in the academic world with its own journals, handbooks, and conferences, but also in the industry, notably the service industry, due to its relevance to the development of spoken dialogue systems (SDSs). The idea behind these systems is that they should be capable to engage in meaningful dialogues with human beings in order to fulfill some tasks on behalf of the user much the same as a human service operator would do. In this work we will cover basic aspects of such systems and will provide sufficient theoretical background necessary to understand the functionality as well as the challenges the development of such systems encounter. First of all, we have to clarify concepts that are important with respect to pragmatics, including the term pragmatics itself. According to [Levinson, 1983], Pragmatics is the study of the relation between the structure of a semiotic system (in particular language) and its usage in context. But,