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<Paper uid="P94-1006">
  <Title>INTENTIONS AND INFORMATION IN DISCOURSE</Title>
  <Section position="11" start_page="39" end_page="39" type="concl">
    <SectionTitle>
CONCLUSIONS AND
FURTHER WORK
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> We have argued that it is important to separate reasoning about mental states from reasoning about discourse structure, and we have suggested how to integrate a formal theory of discourse attachment with common-sense reasoning about the discourse participants' cognitive states and actions.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> We exploited a classic principle of commonsense reasoning about action, the Practical Syllogism, to model I's inferences about A's cognitive state during discourse processing. We also showed how axioms could be defined, so as to enable information to mediate between the domain, discourse structure and communicative intentions. null Reasoning about intentional structure took a different form from reasoning about discourse attachment, in that explanatory reasoning or abduction was permitted for the former but not the latter (but cf. Hobbs et al, 1990). This, we argued, was a principled reason for maintaining separate representations of intentional structure and discourse structure, but preserving close links between them via axioms like Cooperation. Cooperation enabled I to use A's communicative intentions to reason about discourse relations.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> This paper provides an analysis of only very simple discourses, and we realise that although we have introduced distinctions among the attitudes, which we have exploited during discourse processing, this is only a small part of the story.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> Though DICE has used domain specific information to infer discourse relations, the rules relate domain structure to discourse structure in at best an indirect way. Implicitly, the use of the discourse update fimction (v, c~, ~) in the DICE rules reflects the intuitively obvious fact that domain information is filtered through the cognitive state of A. To make this explicit, the discourse community should integrate work on speech acts and attitudes (Perrault 1990, Cohen and Levesque 1990a, 1990b) with theories of discourse structure. In future work, we will investigate discourses where other axioms linking the different attitudes and discourse structure are important.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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