Discourse Obligations in Dialogue Processing

13 years 5 months ago

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We show that in modeling social interaction, particularly dialogue, the attitude of obligation can be a useful adjunct to the popularly considered attitudes of belief, goal, and intention and their mutual and shared counterparts. In particular, we show how discourse obligations can be used to account in a natural manner for the connection between a question and its answer in dialogue and how obligations can be used along with other parts of the discourse context to extend the coverage of a dialogue system. 1 Motivation Most computational models of discourse are based primarily on an analysis of the intentions of the speakers (e.g., [Cohen and Perrault, 1979; Allen and Perrault, 1980; Grosz and Sidner, 1986]). An agent has certain goals, and communication results from a planning process to achieve these goals. The speaker will form intentions based on the goals and then act on these intentions, producing utterances. The hearer will then reconstruct a model of the speaker's intenti...

David R. Traum, James F. Allen

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