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Incrementality and intention-recognition in utterance processing

Paper · 2011 · Eleni Gregoromichelaki, Ruth Kempson, Matthew Purver et al.

Summary

The paper asks whether everyday conversation really requires speakers and hearers to compute nested, higher-order intentions about each other, as Gricean and joint-action models such as Clark (1996) assume. The authors first review philosophical and developmental objections. These include Millikan's teleosemantics, Brandom's social-inferential view, the regress problems raised by the Strawson and Schiffer scenarios, and evidence that young children converse before they can reason about others' minds. They then focus on split utterances, where one participant starts a sentence and another continues or completes it. They analyse these in Dynamic Syntax, a grammar in which "syntax" means the word-by-word, monotonic growth of a semantic tree. Parsing and generation share the same goal-directed, predictive machinery. Because of this, taking over or finishing someone else's utterance follows directly from the architecture, and mind-reading is not needed. The conclusion is that much dialogue coordination, including repair and turn projection, can emerge from low-level processing. On this view, recognising speaker intentions is optional rather than a defining property of communication.

Key points

  • The paper appeared in Dialogue and Discourse 2(1), 2011, pp. 199–233. The authors are Gregoromichelaki, Kempson, Purver, Mills, Cann, Meyer-Viol and Healey, and the work was funded by the DynDial ESRC project.
  • The formal framework is Dynamic Syntax (DS). Interpretation is built incrementally as a tree that grows left to right. Production uses the same steps as parsing, but each step is checked against a goal tree.
  • Split utterances (shared or compound contributions) are the main test case. Speaker and hearer can swap roles mid-sentence, and grammatical dependencies can still be resolved across the switch.
  • Repair and mid-utterance self-correction are handled by the normal processing mechanism rather than a special module. This works because the grammar licenses partial strings.
  • Conversation Analysis notions such as projection and sequentiality are treated as consequences of the grammar's predictive design. Implicature can still be modelled through richer contexts built from LINKed trees, without obligatory metarepresentation of the interlocutor.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. A single incremental mechanism serves both understanding and generation, with production only adding a check that each partial structure stays compatible with a goal.
  • I2. A partial structure can be completed by a different contributor, and the result is accepted if it is a compatible extension of the original goal.
  • I3. Repair is treated as ordinary incremental accumulation of information rather than an exception path.
  • I4. Prediction of what may follow is built into the parser, and this expectation explains turn-taking and completions.
  • I5. Intention reasoning is an optional, derivative layer used mainly when normal processing fails, such as in deception or misunderstanding.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (back): The generator could re-parse its own output step by step against the target meaning graph, so every emitted word is justified by the graph it extends.
  • I2 (world): When several sentences or speakers contribute to one event, the world model could merge fragments by checking compatible extension rather than requiring each sentence to be a complete proposition.
  • I3 (frames): Self-corrections and reformulations in dialogue text ("I mean…") could update the existing frame in place, keeping a traceable record of what was replaced.
  • I4 (tree): The parser's expected-dependents state for an open head could be exposed and reused to handle fragments and elliptical answers that complete an earlier question.
  • I5 (frames): The pragmatics crate could run implicature and speaker-intent inference only when literal frame construction leaves conflicts, keeping the default path cheap and explainable.

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

 Institutions

🎓Stanford UniversityStanford · United States310 works · 284,480 citations🎓University of EdinburghEdinburgh · United Kingdom255 works · 68,771 citations🎓Queen Mary University of LondonLondon · United Kingdom39 works · 3,307 citations🎓King's College LondonLondon · United Kingdom19 works · 1,454 citations

📚 Shelves 4 Computer Science · 9,086 works Artificial Intelligence · 8,889 works Arts and Humanities · 9,296 works Language and Linguistics · 9,206 works

Cite

Cite as Eleni Gregoromichelaki, Ruth Kempson, Matthew Purver, Gregory J. Mills, Ronnie Cann, Wilfried Meyer-Viol and Patrick G. T. Healey. 2011. Incrementality and intention-recognition in utterance processing. Dialogue & Discourse.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.5087/dad.2011.109

@inproceedings{gregoromichelaki2011incrementality,
  title = {{Incrementality and intention-recognition in utterance processing}},
  author = {Eleni Gregoromichelaki, Ruth Kempson, Matthew Purver, Gregory J. Mills, Ronnie Cann, Wilfried Meyer-Viol and Patrick G. T. Healey},
  booktitle = {Dialogue \& Discourse},
  year = {2011},
  doi = {10.5087/dad.2011.109},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.5087/dad.2011.109}
}

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