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Conversational Implicatures in Indirect Replies

Summary

The paper addresses how a dialogue system can understand and produce indirect answers to yes/no questions. For example, replying "My car's not running" to "Did you go shopping?" signals "no" without saying it. Green and Carberry (University of Delaware, ACL 1992) treat such answers as particularized conversational implicatures. They propose a model with three ingredients:

  • a shared discourse expectation that the addressee will address the truth of the questioned proposition;
  • discourse plan operators describing conventional ways to affirm or deny;
  • implicit discourse relations in the spirit of Mann and Thompson.

Each operator conveys a relation between the direct answer and the extra material. The direct answer is an optional step, so it can be omitted and still recovered whenever the relation is recognizable. Plausibility of a relation is judged with defeasible inference rules.

The authors give paired algorithms for interpretation and generation that draw on the same operators. These work over multi-sentence discourse units rather than single sentences. The work is a formal proposal: it has no corpus, no implementation and no empirical evaluation. Its contribution is a unified account that covers implicatures beyond the reach of earlier scalar-implicature models.

Key points

  • The model rests on the expectation Answer-YNQ(p). Under it, the reply may implicate p, not-p, support for p, or support for not-p.
  • Discourse relations are defined with defeasible rules over STRIPS-style plan notions, such as applicability conditions, preconditions, steps and goals. The relations are:
    • Obstacle
    • Elaboration
    • Concession
    • Cause-Non-Volitional
    • Motivate-Volitional-Action
  • Plan operators include Deny (with Obstacle), Affirm (with Elaboration) and Deny (with Concession). Hierarchical Tell sub-plans let a single reply span several sentences.
  • Comparison with Hirschberg (1985): her scalar-implicature licensing rules ignore discourse relations and work one sentence at a time. The authors adopt defeasible relation inference from Lascarides, Asher and Oberlander.
  • Open problems listed by the authors:
    • choosing among competing operators;
    • ordering the steps of a reply;
    • deciding when the direct answer may be dropped;
    • implementing the relation-inference mechanism.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

Fields: Linguistics & languages

Topics: Discourse analysis · Implicature

Cited by

6 papers of our library cite it (of the 140673 whose bibliographies we read); 3 of them have a page here, 3 not yet.

Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.3115/981967.981976

@inproceedings{green1992conversational,
  title = {{Conversational Implicatures in Indirect Replies}},
  author = {Green, Nancy and Carberry, Sandra},
  booktitle = {30th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics},
  year = {1992},
  doi = {10.3115/981967.981976},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.3115/981967.981976}
}

References

30 references, 3 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

  1. Allen, James F. (1979). A Plan-Based Approach to Speech Act Recognition. PhD thesis, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada. find
  2. Austin, J. L. (1962). How To Do Things With Words. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. find
  3. Carberry, Sandra (1990). Plan Recognition in Natural Language Dialogue. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. find
  4. Clark, H. & Marshall, C. (1981). Definite reference and mutual knowledge. In A. K. Joshi, B. Webber, & I. Sag (Eds.), Elements of discourse understanding. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. find
  5. Fikes, R. E. & Nilsson, N. J. (1971). Strips: A new approach to the application of theorem proving to problem solving. Artificial Intelligence, 2, 189-208. ↗
  6. Gazdar, G. (1979). Pragmatics: lmplicature, Presupposition, and Logical Form. New York: Academic Press. find
  7. Green, Nancy L. (1990). Normal state implicature. In Proceedings of the 28th Annual Meeting, Pittsburgh. Association for Computational Linguistics. find
  8. Grice, H. Paul (1975). Logic and conversation. In Cole, P. & Morgan, J. L. (Eds.), Syntax and Semantics III: Speech Acts, (pp. 41-58)., New York. Academic Press. ↗
  9. Grosz, Barbara & Sidner, Candace (1988). Plans for discourse. In P. Cohen, J. Morgan, M. Pollack (Eds.), Intentions in Communication. MIT Press. find
  10. Hintikka, J. (1962). Knowledge and Belief. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. find
  11. Hirschberg, Julia B. (1985). A Theory of Scalar Implicature. PhD thesis, University of Pennsylvania. ttoracek, Helmut (1991). Exploiting conversational implicature for generating concise explanations. In Proceedings. European Association for Computational Linguistics. find
  12. Hovy, Eduard H. (1988). Planning coherent multi-sentential text. In Proceedings of the 26th Annual Meeting, (pp. 163-169). Association for Computational Linguistics. find
  13. Joshi, Aravind, Webber, Bonnie, & Weischedel, Ralph (1984a). Living up to expectations: Computing expert responses. In Proceedings of the Fourth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, (pp. 169-175)., Austin, Texas. find
  14. Joshi, Aravind, Webber, Bonnie, & Weischedel, Ralph (1984b). Preventing false inferences. In Proceedings of Coling84, (pp. 134-138), Stanford University, California. Association for Computational Linguistics. find
  15. Lambert, Lynn & Carberry, Sandra (1991). A tripartite plan-based model of dialogue. In Proceedings of the 29th Annual Meeting, (pp. 47-54). Association for Computational Linguistics. find
  16. Lascarides, Alex & Asher, Nicholas (1991). Discourse relations and defensible knowledge. In Proceedings of the 2gth Annual Meeting, (pp. 55-62). Association for Computational Linguistics. find
  17. Lascarides, Alex & Oberlander, Jon (1992). Temporal coherence and defensible knowledge. Theoretical Linguistics, 18. find
  18. Litman, Diane & Allen, James (1987). A plan recognition model for subdialogues in conversation. Cognitive Science, 11, 163-200. find
  19. Mann, William C. & Thompson, Sandra A. (1983). Relational propositions in discourse. Technical Report ISI/RR-83-115, ISI/USC. find
  20. Mann, William C. & Thompson, Sandra A. (1987). Rhetorical structure theory: Toward a functional theory of text organization. Text, 8(3), 167-182. ↗ our card
  21. McCafferty, Andrew S. (1987). Reasoning about Implicature: a Plan-Based Approach. PhD thesis, University of Pittsburgh. find
  22. Moore, Johanna D. & Paris, Cecile (1989). Planning text for advisory dialogues. In Proceedings of the 27th Annual Meeting, University of British Columbia, Vancouver. Association of Computational Linguistics. find
  23. Moore, Johanna D. ~z Paris, Cecile L. (1988). Constructing coherent text using rhetorical relations. In Proc. lOth Annual Conference. Cognitive Science Society. find
  24. Perrault, Raymond & Allen, James (1980). A plan-based analysis of indirect speech acts. American Journal of Computational Linguistics, 6(3-4), 167-182. ↗ our card
  25. Pollack, Martha (1988). Plans as complex mental attitudes. In P. Cohen, J. Morgan, & M. Pollack (Eds.), Intentions in Communication. MIT Press. find
  26. Reichman, Rachel (1984). Extended person-machine interface. Artificial Intelligence, 22, 157-218. find
  27. Reiter, Ehud (1990). The computational complexity of avoiding conversational implicatures. In Proceedings of the 28th Annual Meeting, (pp. 97-104)., Pittsburgh. Association for Computational Linguistics. find our card
  28. Sadock, Jerrold M. (1978). On testing for conversational implicature. In Cole, P. & Morgan, J. L. (Eds.), Syntax and Semantics, (pp. 281-297)., N.Y. Academic Press. ↗
  29. Thomason, Richmond H. (1990). Accommodation, meaning, and implicature: Interdisciplinary foundations for pragmatics. In P. Cohen, J. Morgan, &; M. Pollack (Eds.), Intentions in Communication. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. ↗
  30. Wainer, Jacques & Maida, Anthony (1991). Good and bad news in formalizing generalized implicatures. In Proceedings of the Sixteenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, (pp. 66-71)., Berkeley, California. ↗

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