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A Plan-Based Analysis of Indirect Speech Act

Summary

This 1980 article by C. Raymond Perrault and James F. Allen, published in the American Journal of Computational Linguistics, explains why sentences whose grammatical mood suggests one act can perform another. For example, a yes/no question such as "Can you pass the salt?" can work as a request. The authors build on the speech act operators of Cohen and Perrault [1979] and place them in a planning framework. In this framework, agents hold beliefs and wants, actions have preconditions and effects, and hearers reconstruct speakers' plans using plausible inference rules.

Cooperative goal adoption is motivated independently of language. The hearer treats an utterance as an indirect act only when they believe the speaker intended that cooperation to be recognized. Otherwise the utterance is read literally. Heuristics rank the competing interpretations.

The model was implemented as a program that plays a railway station information clerk. This gives a computational, competence-level account of how literal form relates to conveyed force in dialogue systems.

Key points

  • New operators: The REQUEST and INFORM operators from Cohen and Perrault are reformulated. Two surface-level acts, S.REQUEST and S.INFORM, are added and tied to sentence mood. A question is treated as an S.REQUEST to INFORM.
  • Inference rules: Simple plan inference rules, such as moving from wanting an action to wanting its effects, are turned into complex ones. This is done by embedding the rules under "hearer believes speaker wants" (the rule's antecedent and consequent).
  • Implementation: The program parses simple English input with an ATN parser. It outputs the recognized speech acts and their propositional content. Implementation details appear in Allen [1979].
  • Worked examples: The paper derives several forms as requests to pass the salt, including "Can you pass the salt?". It also shows why "Do you know that the train is late?" can inform, while the "Do you believe…" variant cannot.
  • Stated limitations:
    • Only acts of requesting and informing are covered.
    • Tag questions and why/how questions are not handled.
    • The co-occurrence behaviour of "please" remains unexplained.
    • The action formalism cannot express conditionals, iteration or parallelism.
    • Control of inferencing still needs further 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

Cited by

43 papers of our library cite it (of the 140673 whose bibliographies we read); 11 of them have a page here, 32 not yet.

Cite

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

@inproceedings{perrault1980plan,
  title = {{A Plan-Based Analysis of Indirect Speech Act}},
  author = {Perrault, C. Raymond},
  booktitle = {OLAC - Open Language Archives Community},
  year = {1980},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/J80-3003/}
}

References

39 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

  1. Allen, J.F. A Plan-Based Approach to Speech Act Recognition. P h . D . Thesis, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Toronto, 1979. find
  2. Allen, J.F. Recognizing Intentions from Natural Language Utterances, forthcoming. Allen, J.F. and Perrault, C.R., Analyzing Intention in Utterances, Artificial Intelligence, 15, 3, pp. 143-178, 1980. find
  3. Appelt, D.E., Problem Solving Applied to Language Generation, Prec. of 18th Annual Meeting of Assoc. for Comp. Ling., pp. 59-63, 1980. find
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  6. Brachman, R.J., Bobrow, R.J., Cohen, P.R., Klovstad, J.W., Webber, B.L., and Woods, W.A., Research in Natural Language Understanding, Report 4274, Bolt, Beranek, and Newman, Cambridge, Mass., 1980. find
  7. Brown, G.P. Characterizing Indirect Speech Acts :A Computational Approach, Am. J. of Comp. Ling., this issue, pp. 150-166, 1980. find
  8. Bruce, B.C. Belief Systems and Language Understanding, Technical Report 2973, Bolt Beranek and Newman, Cambridge Mass, 1975. find
  9. Cohen, P.R. On Knowing What to Say: Planning Speech Acts, Technical Report no. 118, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Toronto January, 1978. find
  10. Cohen, P.R., and Levesque, H.J., Speech Acts and the Recognition of Shared Plans, in Prec. of 3rd Con f. of Can. Soc. for Comp. Studies of Intelligence, Victoria, B.C., pp. 263-271, 1980. find
  11. Cohen, P.R. and Perrault, C.R. Elements of a Plan Based Theory of Speech Acts, Cognitive Science, 3, 3, pp. 177-212, 1979. find
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  17. Green, G. M. How to Get People to Do Things with Words: the Whimperative Question, in Cole and Morgan (eds.), 1975. find
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  21. McDonald, D.D., Natural Language Production as a Process of Decision Making under Constraint, Ph.D. Dissertation, Dept. of E.E. and Comp. So., MIT, 1980. find
  22. American Journal of Computational Linguistics, Volume 6, Number 3-4, July-December 1980 find
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  25. Morgan, J.L. Towards a Rational Model of Discourse Comprehension, in Prec. of Second Conf. Theoretical Issues in Natural Language Processing, Champaign-Urbana, 1978. find
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