Plans, Inference, and Indirect Speech Acts

What it is about

The classic plan-based account of speech acts. A speech act is an operator in a planning system, with preconditions and effects on the speaker's beliefs and goals. A hearer recognises an utterance by building the plan that could have produced it: rules link surface acts to intentions, and "augmented" rules add the condition that the hearer believes the speaker meant them to be recognised. For the request "Do you know when the Windsor train leaves?", the literal plan (a yes/no question) and the indirect one (a request for the time) are both deducible. Plausibility heuristics pick between them: one heuristic lowers the plausibility of a plan in which the agent is believed to be achieving an effect that is already believed true. The model was run as a program playing a train-station clerk. The paper gives no measurements; the argument is by example.

Ideas

• I1. prag/src/infer.rs: score each reading of an indirect question by whether its effect is already in the world. If "the train leaves at 3:15" is already known, down-weight the request reading, with the reason in the output.
• I2. Keep both readings when the scores are close, and output the one that yields an obligation (the clerk must give a reason for not answering), as the paper does. Test on a few written dialogues.
• I3. Write the plausibility rules as a small table in prag/src/infer.rs with one line of text per rule, so each judgment can be traced to one rule.

For Mova

The chapter is 31. Speech acts (indirect speech acts) and 32. Politeness and hedging (indirect requests). The code is prag/src/infer.rs (rule scores) and prag/src/roles.rs (who wants what). Measure: the chosen reading on ten written indirect questions, where the world either does or does not already hold the effect; run twice. The paper has no numbers, so the test set is new.

Topics: Speech act theory

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.3115/982163.982187

@inproceedings{allen1979plans,
  title = {{Plans, Inference, and Indirect Speech Acts}},
  author = {Allen, James F.},
  booktitle = {17th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics},
  year = {1979},
  doi = {10.3115/982163.982187},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.3115/982163.982187}
}

References

12 references, 1 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 t o Speech Ac_tt Recognition. Ph.D. thesis, Computer Science Department, U n i v e r s i t y o f T o r o n t o , 1979. find
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3. Brown, G.P. An Approach t o Processing D i a l o g u e , unpublished ms, MIT, 1978. find
4. Task-Oriented Cohen, P.R. On Znowin 6 What t o Say: Plannin~ Speech Acts, TR 118, Computer Science Department, U n i v e r s i t y o f T o r o n t o , January 1978. find
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6. F l k e s , R.E. and N l l s s o n , N.J. STRIPS: A New Approach t o the A p p l i c a t i o n o f Theorem Proving t o Problem Solving. Artificial I n t e l l i e n c e 2, 189-205, 1971. find
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11. P e r r a u l t , C.R. and A l l e n , J.F. A'Plan-Based o f I n d i r e c t Speech Acts, in p r e p a r a t i o n . Analysis Searle, Cambridge J.R. Speech Acts. 1969. find our card
12. New York, University Press, S e a r l e , J.R. Indirect ( e d a ) , 1975. find
13. Speech Acts, in Cole Morgan and Intention and Convention in Speech A c t s . Strawson, P.F. Rev. Phil. 73, q, q39-~60, 196~. Walker, D.E. Understandin~ Spoken Language. North H o l l a n d , 1978. find

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