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Two Constraints on Speech Act Ambiguity

Summary

The paper addresses how a dialogue system can work out what act a speaker performs with an utterance (asking, requesting, offering, and so on). Earlier approaches each fall short. Idiom lists are rigid and ignore context. Pure plan-based inference cannot explain language-specific conventions, such as why "Can you…?" readily works as a request while its "are you able to…?" paraphrase does not. Descriptive accounts lack theoretical grounding.

Hinkelman and Allen combine two constraints:

  • Linguistic rules. Compositional, language-specific rules map features such as mood, modal verbs, adverbs like "please" and thematic roles onto partial speech act descriptions. These candidates are merged during normal syntactic and semantic processing, and ambiguity is kept open rather than resolved early.
  • Plan-based filtering. A limited plan reasoner discards candidates whose conversational implicatures are implausible in context. Full plan reasoning is invoked only when no conventional reading survives.

Any ambiguity that remains is treated as input to the hearer's own planning, not as a failure. This makes the account more flexible across languages and more consistent with psycholinguistic evidence.

Key points

  • Rules pair a left-hand pattern of linguistic features with a set of possible speech act types. Each rule also keeps a generic SPEECH-ACT option so that other readings stay available.
  • The rule linking "please" to a DIRECTIVE-ACT was checked against roughly 43 million words of Associated Press news. That corpus contains several hundred occurrences of "please", mostly as a preverbal adverb in directives.
  • One rule marks yes/no questions with subject "you" and a modal from {can, could, will, would, might} as likely requests.
  • The notation follows [Allen 87]. It keeps a SEM slot for logical form with thematic roles separate from a REF slot for the knowledge-base representation.
  • The system is written in Common Lisp on the Rhetorical knowledge representation system [Miller 87]. The rule-matching/merging module and the implicature-checking module work and run the Spanish example. Extended plan reasoning is left for future work.

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: Speech act theory · Implicature · Semantic role labeling

Cited by

11 papers of our library cite it (of the 140673 whose bibliographies we read); 1 of them have a page here, 10 not yet.

Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.3115/981623.981649

@inproceedings{hinkelman1989two,
  title = {{Two Constraints on Speech Act Ambiguity}},
  author = {Hinkelman, Elizabeth A. and Allen, James F.},
  booktitle = {27th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics},
  year = {1989},
  doi = {10.3115/981623.981649},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.3115/981623.981649}
}

References

18 references, 1 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

  1. Allen, J., "Recognizing Intentions From Natural Language Utterances," in Computational Models of Discourse, Brady, M. and Berwick, B. (ed.), MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1983, 107-166. find
  2. Allen, J., Natural Language Understanding, Benjamin Cummings Publishing Co., 1987. find
  3. Austin, J. L., How to Do Things with Words, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1962. find
  4. Brown, G. P., "Characterizing Indirect Speech Acts," American Journal of Computational Linguistics6:3-4, July-December 1980, 150-166. find
  5. Clark, H., Collective Actions in Language Use, Invited Talk, September 2 I, 1988. find
  6. Gazdar, G., Pragmatics: Implicature, Presupposition and Logical Form, Academic Press, New York, 1979. find
  7. Gibbs, R., "Literal Meaning and Psychological Theory," Cognitive Science 8, 1984, 275-304. ↗
  8. Gordon, D. and Lakoff, G., "Conversational Postulates," in Syntax and Semantics V. 3, Cole, P. and Morgan, J. L. (ed.), Academic Press, New York, 1975. find
  9. Hinkelman, E., "Thesis Proposal: A Plan-Based Approach to Conversational Implicature," TR 202, Dept. Computer Science, University of Rochester, June 1987. find
  10. Hirschberg, J., "A Theory of Scalar of Implicature," MS-CIS-85-56, PhD Thesis, Department of Computer and Information Science, University of Pennsylvania, December 1985. find
  11. Horn, L. R. and Bayer, S., Short-Circuited Implicature: A Negative Contribution, Vol. 7, 1984. find
  12. Horton, D. L., "Incorporating Agents' Beliefs in a Model of Presupposition," Technical Report CSRI-201, Computer Systems Research Institute, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada, August 1987. find
  13. Jackendoff, R. S., Semantic Interpretation in Generative Grammar, MIT Press, Cambridge, 1972. find
  14. McCafferty, A. S., Explaining Implicatures, 23 October 1986. find
  15. Miller, B. and Allen, J., The Rhetorical Knowledge Representation System: A User's Manual, forthcoming technical report, Department of Computer Science, University of Rochester, 1987. ['Perrault 80] Perrault, C. R. and Allen, J. F., "A Plan-Based Analysis of Indirect Speech Acts," American Journal of Computational Linguistics 6:3-4, July-December 1980, 167-82. find our card
  16. Searle, J., in Speech Acts, Cambridge University Press, New York, 1969. find
  17. Searle, J., "Indirect Speech Acts," in Syntax and Semantics, v3: Speech Acts, Cole and Morgan (ed.), Academic Press, New York, NY, 1975. ↗
  18. Sidner, C. L. and Israel, D. J., "Recognizing Intended Meaning and Speakers' Plans," Proc. IJCA1 '81, 1981, 203-208. find

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