Postscript Version

Integrated Techniques for Natural Language Generation and Interpretation

Richmond H. Thomason and Jerry Hobbs

CONTACT INFORMATION (THOMASON)

Richmond H. Thomason
Intelligent Systems Program
University of Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh, PA 15260
Phone: (412) 441-0193
Fax : (412) 624-6130
Email: thomason@isp.pitt.edu

WWW PAGE (THOMASON)

http://www.pitt.edu/~thomason/thomason.html

CONTACT INFORMATION (HOBBS)

Jerry Hobbs SRI International
333 Ravenswood Ave.
Menlo Park, CA 94025
Phone: (415) 859-2229
Fax : (415) 859-3735
Email: hobbs@ai.sri.com

WWW PAGE (HOBBS)

http://www.ai.sri.com/people/hobbs.html

PROGRAM AREA

Other Communication Modalities (The explanation page for the six program areas)

KEYWORDS

nl-generation, nl-interpretation, discourse, speech-acts, discourse-simulation, abduction, discourse-planning.

PROJECT SUMMARY

The long-range project goal is to create a unified architecture for interactive discourse, incorporating both interpretation and generation. The immediate goal is to develop an environment for simulating and testing dialog in cooperative planning environments. The project focuses on four theoretical problems: (1) the recognition by the hearer of the speaker's plan; (2) a formalization of the notion of the "conversational record"; (3) a computational treatment of discourse structure; and (4) the analysis of quantity implicatures and other phenomena that crucially involve interactions between the processes of generation and interpretation. At the same time, the project is developing an environment for tracking coordination in human task-oriented discourse. Using abductive reasoning as a framework, we are extending this environment to develop a discourse simulator for the domain. The basis of our approach to interpretation is the abductive model of Jerry Hobbs and his associates at SRI. The basis of our approach to generation is the plan-based approach of Johanna Moore. Ideas about the conversational record are based on work of Robert Stalnaker, David Lewis, Herbert Clark, and Richmond Thomason.

PROJECT REFERENCES

For an up-to-date list of project publications, consult the project home page.

Richmond Thomason and Jerry Hobbs, "Interrelating Interpretation and Generation in an Abductive Framework." To appear in Proceedings of AAAI Fall Symposium on Communicative Action in Humans and Machines, 1997.

Barbara Di Eugenio, Pamela Jordan, Richmond Thomason and Johanna Moore, "Reconstructed Intentions in Collaborative Problem Solving Dialogues." To appear in Proceedings of AAAI Fall Symposium on Communicative Action in Humans and Machines, 1997.

Pamela W. Jordan and Barbara Di Eugenio, "Control and Initiative in Collaborative Problem Solving Dialogues." Proceedings AAAI Spring Symposium on Computational Models for Mixed Initiative, 1997.

Jerry R. Hobbs, "On the Relation between the Informational and Intentional Perspectives on Discourse." To appear in Burning Issues in Discourse: An Interdisciplinary Account, edited by Eduard Hovy and Donia Scott, Springer-Verlag.

Jerry R. Hobbs, "An Approach to the Structure of Discourse." To appear in Discourse: Linguistic, Computational, and Philosophical Perspectives, edited by Daniel Everett and Sarah Thomason, University of Pittsburgh Press.

Johanna D. Moore, "The Role of Plans in Discourse Generation." To appear in Discourse: Linguistic, Computational, and Philosophical Perspectives, edited by Daniel Everett and Sarah Thomason, University of Pittsburgh Press.

Richmond Thomason, Jerry Hobbs and Johanna Moore, "Communicative Goals." Proceedings of the ECAI 96 Workshop on Gaps and Bridges: New Directions in Planning and Natural Language Generation. Edited by K. Jokinen, M. Maybury, M. Zock and I. Zukerman. Springer-Verlag, 1997.

Pamela W. Jordan and Marilyn A. Walker, "Deciding to Remind During Collaborative Problem Solving: Empirical Evidence for Agent Strategies." Proceedings of AAAI-96.

Pamela W. Jordan and Richmond H. Thomason, "Refining the Categories of Miscommunication." Proceedings of AAAI Workshop on Detecting, Repairing, and Preventing Human-machine Miscommunication, Portland, OR, August, 1996.

Richmond H. Thomason and Johanna D. Moore, "Discourse Context." Proceedings of the AAAI Fall Symposium on Formalizing Context, 1995.

Richmond H. Thomason and Pamela W. Jordan, "Empirical Methods in Discourse: Limits and Prospects." Proceedings of the AAAI Spring Symposium on Empirical Methods in Discourse Interpretation and Generation, 1995.

AREA BACKGROUND

Rather than working in the context of an established framework, we are trying to develop a combination of theoretical ideas and empirical methods for the study of discourse which will inform the design and testing of interactive systems based on natural language. Some leading ideas are: (1) The importance of combining simulation techniques with corpus analysis in testing hypotheses about discourse; (2) an architecture that provides thorough integration of the representations and reasoning used in interpretation and generation; (3) the use of the conversational record to record the common information that is established in the course of a discourse.

AREA REFERENCES

David K. Lewis, "Scorekeeping in a Language Game," Journal of Philosophical Logic 8 (1979), pp. 339-359.

Herbert Clark, Arenas of Language Use, University of Chicago Press, 1992.

Jerry Hobbs, Mark Stickel, Douglas Appelt and Paul Martin, "Interpretation as Abduction," Artificial Intelligence 63 (1993), pp. 69-142.

Johanna Moore, Participating in Explanatory Dialogues, The MIT Press, 1995.

Richmond Thomason, "Accommodation, Meaning, and Implicature: Interdisciplinary Foundations for Pragmatics." In Philip R. Cohen, Jerry Morgan and Martha Pollack, editors, Intentions in Communication, The MIT Press, 1990, pp. 326--363.

Marilyn A. Walker, "Informational Redundancy and Resource Bounds in Dialog," PhD Dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1993. }

RELATED PROGRAM AREAS