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The Repair of Speech Act Misunderstandings by Abductive Inference

Summary

The paper tackles a gap in dialogue modelling. Earlier systems tried to prevent misconceptions, but none could notice and fix a speech act misunderstanding after it had happened. Such a misunderstanding arises when two participants assign different discourse roles to the same utterance, for example one hears an assertion where the other meant a request. McRoy and Hirst propose a model in which each agent keeps its own record of the discourse. Agents link utterance forms (semantics) to discourse acts (pragmatics) and tie those acts to the beliefs and intentions they express. They also use adjacency-pair expectations from Conversation Analysis to predict what should come next. When a reply clashes with those expectations, the agent revises its earlier reading. Both ordinary interpretation and repair are framed as explanation problems solved by abduction. The model separates beliefs agents truly hold from those they merely act on, and it is illustrated on a real fourth-turn repair. The work matters because it treats repair as a core language ability, a step toward interfaces that recover from their own and users' errors.

Key points

  • The authors separate misconception (wrong prior knowledge) from misunderstanding (an interpretation the hearer thinks is correct but the speaker did not intend).
  • They follow Schegloff (1992) in classifying repairs by turn position. Only third-turn and fourth-turn repairs deal with genuine misunderstandings.
  • The main worked example is Terasaki's (1976) "Do you know who's going…" exchange. In it, Russ first takes the question as a pretelling, then reinterprets it as an indirect request.
  • The model combines intentional (plan/belief-based) and social (Conversation Analysis, adjacency pairs) accounts. Social expectations limit how far the search for interpretations runs.
  • The work is based on McRoy's 1993 thesis and was funded by NSERC (Canada). The authors contrast it with Heeman and Edmonds' work on repairing non-understanding of referring expressions.

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 · Speech act theory

Cite

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

@misc{mcroy1995repair,
  title = {{The Repair of Speech Act Misunderstandings by Abductive Inference}},
  author = {McRoy, Susan W. and Hirst, Graeme},
  year = {1995},
  doi = {10.5555/218355.218360},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.5555/218355.218360}
}

References

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