ESCA Workshop on Interactive Dialogue in Multi-Modal Systems (IDS-99) June 22-25, 1999 Kloster Irsee, Germany

Implicit Goals in Indirect Replies

Mark Lee

School of Computer Science, University of Birmingham, UK

Indirection is a common phenomenon in natural language dialogue. Therefore, any system designed to deal with dialogue must be able to handle indirection. Despite this, there has been little work explaining the motivations behind indirection. This is due to an assumption that agents are purely cooperative. In this paper, we present an account of indirect replies to questions based on the concept of agent rationality. This account is implemented in a question-answering system.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Lee, Mark (1999): "Implicit goals in indirect replies", In IDS-99, 25-28.