Reasoning Requirements for Indirect Speech Act Interpretation
Vasanth Sarathy, Alexander Tsuetaki, Antonio Roque, Matthias Scheutz
Abstract
We perform a corpus analysis to develop a representation of the knowledge and reasoning used to interpret indirect speech acts. An indirect speech act (ISA) is an utterance whose intended meaning is different from its literal meaning. We focus on those speech acts in which slight changes in situational or contextual information can switch the dominant intended meaning of an utterance from direct to indirect or vice-versa. We computationalize how various contextual features can influence a speaker’s beliefs, and how these beliefs can influence the intended meaning and choice of the surface form of an utterance. We axiomatize the domain-general patterns of reasoning involved, and implement a proof-of-concept architecture using Answer Set Programming. Our model is presented as a contribution to cognitive science and psycholinguistics, so representational decisions are justified by existing theoretical work.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{sarathy-etal-2020-reasoning,
title = "Reasoning Requirements for Indirect Speech Act Interpretation",
author = "Sarathy, Vasanth and
Tsuetaki, Alexander and
Roque, Antonio and
Scheutz, Matthias",
editor = "Scott, Donia and
Bel, Nuria and
Zong, Chengqing",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics",
month = dec,
year = "2020",
address = "Barcelona, Spain (Online)",
publisher = "International Committee on Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2020.coling-main.433/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2020.coling-main.433",
pages = "4937--4948"
}