Levels of Complexity in Discourse for Anaphora Disambiguation and Speech Act Interpretation

Abs t r ac t : This paper presents a discussion of means of describing the discourse and its components which makes speech act i n te rp re ta t i on and anaphora d isambiguat ion possible with minimal search of the knowledge in the database. A p o r t i o n of t h i s paper w i l l cons ider how a f r a m e s representat ion of sentences and common sense knowledge p rov ides a mechanism for represent ing the pos tu la ted discourse components. Finally some discussion of the use of the d i s c o u r s e model and of f rames in a d i s c o u r s e unders tand ing program for a personal assistant w i l l be presented.