This paper examines the encoding of speech acts in KQML at length and in ANSI X12 briefly. KQML is a speech-act-based language developed with ARPA funding, and X12 is the American standard for electronic data interchange (EDI) message formats. I conclude that although speech act theory is highly relevant to electronic communication, the needs of computers are different from those of humans. Com...

The approach outlined in this paper aims to provide better expressivity of unit selection TTS for dialog intended applications while retaining the natural sounding voice quality typical of unit selection synthesis. A small set of speech acts were used to annotate a corpus from one female US English speaker. The corpus was composed of speech read primarily from interactive dialogs of various kin...

Existing plan-based theories of speech act interpretation do not account for the conventional aspect of speech acts. We use patterns of linguistic features (e.g. mood, verb form, sentence adverbials, thematic roles) to suggest a range of speech act interpretations for the utterance. These are filtered using plan-bused conversational implicatures to eliminate inappropriate ones. Extended plan re...

This paper describes a probabilistic method for dialogue act (DA) extraction for concept-based multilingual translation systems. A DA is a unit of a semantic interlingua and it consists of speaker information, speech act, concept and argument. Probabilistic models for the extraction of speech acts or concepts are trained as speech act or concept dependent word n-gram models. The proposed method...

A dialogue game is presented that enables us to generate coherent elementary conversational sequences at the speech act level. Central to the approach is that the cognitive states of players change as a result of the interpretation of speech acts and that these changes provoke the production of a subsequent speech act. It will be shown that the structure and the coherence of conversational unit...

A speech act is a linguistic action intended by a speaker. It is important to analyze the speech act for the dialogue understanding system because the speech act of an utterance is closely tied with the user’s intention in the utterance. This paper proposes to use a speech acts hierarchy and a discourse stack for improving the accuracy of classifiers in speech acts analysis. We first adopt a hi...

This paper reviews the use of speech act theory in AI natural language systems, arguing that attempts to embody speech acts as simple STRIPS-like operators are doomed to failure. The diiculties arise partly from the fact that there is no reliable way of associating speech acts and surface forms, and partly from properties of epistemic logic. 1 Background The aim of the current paper is to serve...

We present a speech act interpretation system that has the generality of previous plan-based approaches but also can distinguish subtleties of phrasing. As a result, a sentence such as Can you pass the salt can be recognized as a request to pass the salt, whereas Tell me whether you are able to pass the salt is a question about the hearer's abilities. The system also provides a framework for in...

Like Humpty Dumpty, many philosophers take pride in saying what they mean and meaning what they say. Literalism does have its virtues, like when you're drawing up a contract or programming a computer, but generally we prefer to speak loosely and leave a lot to inference. Language works far more efficiently that way. Two Kinds of Looseness It helps if you can rely on people not to take you too l...