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A Hybrid Reasoning Model for Indirect Answers

Summary

Green and Carberry address how a dialogue system can understand and produce replies to English Yes-No questions that never say "yes" or "no" outright but still let the asker work out the answer. Such replies are common, so robust dialogue systems need to handle them. The authors drew on earlier studies, the American Express transcripts (1992) and constructed examples. They encode pragmatic knowledge about answering as domain-independent discourse plan operators and as coherence rules modelled on RST relations. Interpretation is treated as plan recognition, with logical inference used only for consistency checks and hypothesis generation. Generation is treated as plan construction. First, stimulus conditions decide which extra information is worth adding. Second, the plan is pruned of any parts the asker could infer. Both directions share the same knowledge, so the architecture is reversible. The implemented system covers more kinds of indirect answers than earlier computational models. The authors argue that restricting logical inference avoids the scaling and cancellation problems of licensing-rule approaches to implicature.

Key points

  • Stenström (1984) found that 13% of responses to Yes-No questions in spoken English were indirect. Extra information accompanied 61% of direct No answers and 24% of direct Yes answers.
  • The top-level operators are Answer-yes, Answer-no, Answer-hedged, Answer-maybe and Answer-maybe-not. Satellites build on relations such as Condition, Elaboration, Cause, Contrast and Obstacle, where Obstacle is a non-RST relation close to RST's causal relations.
  • During pruning, the generator tests frontier acts from right to left. It removes an act only if a simulated asker would still recover the full plan as the preferred reading.
  • The system was written in Common Lisp and ran on a Sun SPARCstation, and beliefs are represented as Horn clauses.

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

Cited by

8 papers of our library cite it (of the 140673 whose bibliographies we read); 2 of them have a page here, 6 not yet.

Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.3115/981732.981741 · arXiv cmp-lg/9406014

@inproceedings{green1994hybrid,
  title = {{A Hybrid Reasoning Model for Indirect Answers}},
  author = {Green, Nancy and Carberry, Sandra},
  booktitle = {32nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics},
  year = {1994},
  doi = {10.3115/981732.981741},
  eprint = {cmp-lg/9406014},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.3115/981732.981741}
}

References

30 references, 4 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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  2. Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson. Universals in language usage: Politeness phenomena. In Esther N. Goody, editor, Questions and politeness: Strategies in social inleraction, pages 56-289. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1978. find
  3. Sandra Carberry. Plan Recognition in Natural Language Dialogue. MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1990. find
  4. H. Clark and C. Marshall. Definite reference and mutual knowledge. In A. K. Joshi, B. Webber, and I. Sag, editors, Elements of discourse understanding. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1981. find
  5. Kathleen Dahlgren. Coherence relation assignment. In Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, pages 588-596, 1989. find
  6. Anne-Marie Diller. La pragmatique des questions et des rdponses. In Tfibinger Beitr~ige zur Linguistik 243. Gunter Narr Verlag, Tiibingen, 1989. find
  7. G. Gazdar. Pragmatics: lmplicature, Presupposition, and Logical Form. Academic Press, New York, 1979. find
  8. Nancy L. Green. Normal state implicature. In Proceedings of the 28th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 89-96, 1990. find
  9. Nancy L. Green and Sandra Carberry. Conversational implicatures in indirect replies. In Proceedings of the 30th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 64-71, 1992. find our card
  10. H. Paul Grice. Logic and conversation. In P. Cole and J. L. Morgan, editors, Syntax and Semantics III: Speech Acts, pages 41-58, New York, 1975. Academic Press. ↗
  11. J. E. Grimes. The Thread of Discourse. Mouton, The Hague, 1975. ↗
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  15. Jerry R. Hobbs. Coherence and coreference. Cognitive Science, 3:67-90, 1979. ↗
  16. Helmut Horacek. An Integrated View of Text Planning. In R. Dale, E. Hovy, D. RSsner, and O. Stock, editors, Aspects of Automated Natural Language Generation, pages 29-44, Berlin, 1992. Springer-Verlag. find
  17. Eduard H. Hovy. Planning coherent multisentential text. In Proceedings of the 26th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 163-169, 1988. find
  18. Robin Lakoff. Questionable answers and answerable questions. In Braj B. Kachru, Robert B. Lees, Yakov Malkiel, Angelina Pietrangeli, and Sol Saporta, editors, Papers in Honor of Henry and Rende Kahane, pages 453-467, Urbana, 1973. University of Illinois Press. find
  19. Alex Lascarides and Nicholas Asher. Discourse relations and defeasible knowledge. In Proceedings of the 29th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 55-62, 1991. find our card
  20. S. Levinson. Pragmatics. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1983. find
  21. Andrew Schaub McCafferty. Reasoning about lmplicature: a Plan-Based Approach. PhD thesis, University of Pittsburgh, 1987. find
  22. Kathleen R. McKeown. Text Generation. Cambridge University Press, 1985. find
  23. W. C. Mann and S. A. Thompson. Rhetorical structure theory: Toward a functional theory of text organization. Text, 8(3):167-182, 1987. ↗ our card
  24. Johanna D. Moore and Cecile L. Paris. Constructing coherent text using rhetorical relations. In Proceedings of the lOth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, August 1988. find
  25. R. Perrault and J. Allen. A plan-based analysis of indirect speech acts. American Journal of Computational Linguistics, 6(3-4):167-182, 1980. ↗ our card
  26. Livia Polanyi. The linguistics discourse model: Towards a formal theory of discourse structure. Technical Report 6409, Bolt Beranek and Newman Laboratories Inc., Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1987. find
  27. Rachel Reichman. Extended person-machine interface. Artificial Intelligence, 22:157-218, 1984. find
  28. Anna-Brita StenstrSm. Questions and responses in english conversation. In Claes Schaar and Jan Svartvik, editors, Lund Studies in English 68. CWK Gleerup, MalmS, Sweden, 1984. find
  29. Richmond H. Thomason. Accommodation, meaning, and implicature: Interdisciplinary foundations for pragmatics. In P. Cohen, J. Morgan, and M. Pollack, editors, Intentions in Communication. MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1990. ↗
  30. Horng Jyh Wu and Steven Lytinen. Coherence relation reasoning in persuasive discourse. In Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, pages 503-510, 1990. find

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