Speech act theory
What it is
Speech act theory starts from a simple observation: when we speak we do things. «I promise to come» makes a promise, «Close the door» gives an order, «Could you pass the salt?» is a request dressed as a question. The philosophers J. L. Austin and John Searle gave this its names: the act of saying something, the act done in saying it (the illocutionary act), and its effect on the hearer.
In language technology the same idea appears as dialogue acts: every turn of a conversation is labelled as a question, an answer, a statement, a request, a greeting and so on. The labels help a system understand what a speaker wants, not only what the words say.
How Mova does it
Mova's pragmatics labels the speech act of every sentence, and a frame of speech or thought carries its act from a closed list. The labeller is small and transparent: an averaged perceptron, a decision tree and nearest neighbours, side by side, trained on silver labels from a teacher, read features of the tree and its context (the form of the sentence, the speech verb, the act before it) and show the features or the similar sentences behind each choice. An agreer checks our labels against open tools as witnesses.
- prag — speech acts and their labeller
- Frames and their kinds
- Pragmatics algorithms from the literature
The papers (34)
- Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage — Penelope Brown, Stephen C. Levinson, John J. Gumperz, 1987 · 10504 citations
- Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language — John R. Searle, 1969 · 7309 citations
- Discourse Structure and Dialogue Acts in Multiparty Dialogue: the STAC Corpus — Nicholas Asher, Julie Hunter, Mathieu Morey, Farah Benamara et al., 2016 · 105 citations
- Dialogue Acts, Synchronizing Units, and Anaphora Resolution — Miriam Eckert, Michael Strube, 2000 · 90 citations
- The discourse commitments of illocutionary reportatives — Martina T Faller, 2019 · 70 citations
- Speech act attenuation in the history of English: The case of apologies — Andreas H. Jucker, 2019 · 54 citations
- MIDAS: A Dialog Act Annotation Scheme for Open Domain Human-Machine Spoken Conversations — Dian Yu, Zhou Yu, 2021 · 39 citations
- Speaker Turn Modeling for Dialogue Act Classification — Zihao He, Leili Tavabi, Kristina Lerman, Mohammad Soleymani, 2021 · 34 citations
- ISO-Standard Domain-Independent Dialogue Act Tagging for Conversational Agents — Stefano Mezza, Alessandra Cervone, Evgeny Stepanov, Giuliano Tortoreto et al., 2018 · 29 citations
- A practical introduction to the Rational Speech Act modeling framework — Gregory Scontras, Michael Henry Tessler, Michael Franke, 2021 · 27 citations
- Balancing Expressiveness and Simplicity in an Interlingua for Task Based Dialogue — Lori Levin, Donna Gates, Dorcas Pianta, Roldano Cattoni et al., 2002 · 19 citations
- The ISO Standard for Dialogue Act Annotation, Second Edition — Harry Bunt, Volha Petukhova, Emer Gilmartin, Catherine Pelachaud et al., 2020 · 15 citations
- Biblical Hebrew Wayyiqtol: A Dynamic Definition — Alexander Andrason, 2011 · 15 citations
- Revisiting the ISO standard for dialogue act annotation — Harry Bunt, Volha Petukhova, Alex Chengyu Fang, 2017 · 14 citations
- Modeling Speech Acts in Asynchronous Conversations: A Neural-CRF Approach — Shafiq Joty, Tasnim Mohiuddin, 2018 · 11 citations
- Making It Sound: The Performative Qatal and Its Explanation — Alexander Andrason, 2012 · 8 citations
- Reasoning Requirements for Indirect Speech Act Interpretation — Vasanth Sarathy, Alexander Tsuetaki, Antonio Roque, Matthias Scheutz, 2020 · 5 citations
- Using Speech Acts in Logic-Based Rhetorical Structuring for Natural Language Generation in Human-Computer Dialogue — Vladimir Popescu, Jean Caelen, Corneliu Burileanu, 2007 · 5 citations
- Plans, Inference, and Indirect Speech Acts — James F. Allen, 1979 · 5 citations
- Tell Me Everything You Know: A Conversation Update System for the Rational Speech Acts Framework — Carolyn Jane Anderson, 2021 · 3 citations
- Modelling the Usage of Discourse Connectives as Rational Speech Acts — Frances Yung, Kevin Duh, Taku Komura, Yuji Matsumoto, 2016 · 3 citations
- Dependency Dialogue Acts — Annotation Scheme and Case Study — Jon Z. Cai, Brendan King, Margaret Perkoff, Shiran Dudy et al., 2023 · 2 citations
- Do LLMs Understand Dialogues? A Case Study on Dialogue Acts — Ayesha Qamar, Jonathan Tong, Ruihong Huang, 2025 · 1 citations
- Referring Expressions with Rational Speech Act Framework: A Probabilistic Approach — Hieu Le, Taufiq Daryanto, Fabian Zhafransyah, Derry Wijaya et al., 2022 · 1 citations
- Completing and Validating the Re-Aligned Switchboard Dialog Act Corpus — Run Chen, Zihao Tao, John Prado, Ignazio LaManna et al., 2026
- Speech act theory and the performative language of lament in the individual Psalms of complaint — Raphael Akhijemen Idialu, Princess Omovrigho Idialu, 2026
- Speech Act Patterns for Improving Generalizability of Explainable Politeness Detection Models — Ahmad Aljanaideh, 2025
- COMICORDA: Dialogue Act Recognition in Comic Books — Jiri Martinek, Pavel Kral, Ladislav Lenc, Josef Baloun, 2024
- Large-scale text pre-training helps with dialogue act recognition, but not without fine-tuning — Bill Noble, Vladislav Maraev, 2021
- Metacommunicative-why fragments as probes into the grammar of the speech act layer — Rebecca Woods, Luis Vicente, 2021
- Developing a Corpus of Indirect Speech Act Schemas — Antonio Roque, Alexander Tsuetaki, Vasanth Sarathy, Matthias Scheutz, 2020
- Towards Universal Dialogue Act Tagging for Task-Oriented Dialogues — Shachi Paul, Rahul Goel, Dilek Hakkani-Tur, 2019
- Dialogue Act Modeling for Automatic Tagging and Recognition of Conversational Speech — Andreas Stolcke, Klaus Ries, Noah Coccaro, Elizabeth Shriberg et al., 2000
- The Linguistic Description and Analysis of 2 Samuel 11–12 From The Perspective of Functional Grammar In the Tradition of Simon Dik — Matthew Anstey, 2000
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