tailieunhanh - Báo cáo khoa học: "EXPLOITING CONVERSATIONAL IMPLICATURE FOR GENERATING CONCISE EXPLANATIONS"

This paper presents an approach for achieving conciseness in generating explanations, which is clone by exploiting formal reconstructions of aspects of the Gricean principle of relevance to simulate conversational implicature. By applying contextually motivated inference rules in an anticipation feed-back loop, a set of propositions explicitly representing an explanation's content is reduced to a subset which, in the actual context, can still be considered to convey the message adequately. | EXPLOITING CONVERSATIONAL IMPLICATURE FOR GENERATING CONCISE EXPLANATIONS HELMUT HORACEK Universitat Bielefeld Fakultat fiiir Linguistik und Literaturwissenschaft Postfach 8640 D-4800 Bielefeld 1 Deutschland ABSTRACT This paper presents an approach for achieving conciseness in generating explanations which is done by exploiting formal reconstructions of aspects of the Gricean principle of relevance to simulate conversational implicature. By applying contextually motivated inference rules in an anticipation feed-back loop a set of propositions explicitly representing an explanation s content is reduced to a subset which in the actual context can still be considered to convey the message adequately. 1. INTRODUCTION The task of providing informative natural language explanations for illustrating the results produced by decision support systems has been given increased attention recently. The proposed methods preferably address tailoring of explanations to the needs of theữ addressees including for instance object descriptions 8 and presentation of taxonomic knowledge 7 . In addition particular emphasis has been put on reactive explanation techniques for selecting an appropriate content according to contextual interpretation 6 and on the way of presenting explanations by taking the information seeking person s knowledge into account 1 . Whereas these approaches attack various issues important for the generation of natural language explanations none of them has focussed on the conciseness of explanations in a broader context. Aiming at the production of natural and concise texts we have concentrated our efforts on presenting different types of knowledge and their inteưelations because this kind of information is typically relevant for explanations. We formally reconstruct aspects of the Gricean principle of relevance 3 and exploit the results obtained for creating concise explanations to questions about solutions proposed by the expert system OFFICE-PLAN 5 . This system