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...

This paper shows how to reconcile epistemic invariantism with the knowledge account of assertion. My basic proposal is that we can comfortably combine invariantism with the knowledge account of assertion by endorsing contextualism about speech acts. My demonstration takes place against the backdrop of recent contextualist attempts to usurp the knowledge account of assertion, most notably Keith ...

We present an application independent dialogue engine that reasons on application dependent knowledge sources to calculate predictions about how a dialogue might continue. Predictions are language independent and are translated into language dependent structures for recognition and synthesis. Further, we discuss how the predictions account for di erent kinds of dialogue, e.g., question-answer o...