tailieunhanh - Báo cáo khoa học: "Abductive Explanation of Dialogue Misunderstandings"

To respond to an utterance, a listener must interpret what others have said and why they have said it. Misunderstandings occur when agents differ in their beliefs about what has been said or why. Our work combines intentional and social accounts of discourse, unifying theories of speech act production, interpretation, and the repair of misunderstandings. | Abductive Explanation of Dialogue Misunderstandings Susan McRoy and Graeme Hirst Department of Computer Science University of Toronto Toronto Canada M5S 1A4 Abstract To respond to an utterance a listener must interpret what others have said and why they have said it. Misunderstandings occur when agents differ in their beliefs about what has been said or why. Our work combines intentional and social accounts of discourse unifying theories of speech act production interpretation and the repair of misunderstandings. A unified theory has been developed by characterizing the generation of utterances as default reasoning and using abduction to characterize interpretation and repair. 1 Introduction When agents participate in a dialogue they bring to it different beliefs and goals. These differences can lead them to make different assumptions about one another s actions construct different interpretations of discourse objects or produce utterances that are either too specific or too vague for others to interpret as intended. As a result agents may fail to understand some part of the dialogue or unknowingly diverge in their understanding of it making a breakdown in communication likely. One strategy an agent might use to address the problem of breakdowns is to try to circumvent them for example by trying to identify and correct apparent confusions about objects or concepts mentioned in the discourse Goodman 1985 McCoy 1985 Calistri-Yeh 1991 Eller and Carberry 1992 . The work reported here takes a different but complementary approach it models how an agent can use what she or he knows about the discourse to recognize whether either participant has misunderstood some previous utterance to repair the misunderstanding. This strategy handles cases that the preventive approaches cannot anticipate. It is also more general because our system can generate repairs on the basis of the relatively few types of manifestations of misunderstanding rather than the much broader and hence .