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.
Anthology ID:
2020.coling-main.433
Volume:
Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
December
Year:
2020
Address:
Barcelona, Spain (Online)
Editors:
Donia Scott, Nuria Bel, Chengqing Zong
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
International Committee on Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
4937–4948
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.coling-main.433
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.coling-main.433
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Vasanth Sarathy, Alexander Tsuetaki, Antonio Roque, and Matthias Scheutz. 2020. Reasoning Requirements for Indirect Speech Act Interpretation. In Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 4937–4948, Barcelona, Spain (Online). International Committee on Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Reasoning Requirements for Indirect Speech Act Interpretation (Sarathy et al., COLING 2020)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.coling-main.433.pdf