<?xml version="1.0" standalone="yes"?>
<Paper uid="J95-4001">
  <Title>The Repair of Speech Act Misunderstandings by Abductive Inference</Title>
  <Section position="5" start_page="467" end_page="468" type="concl">
    <SectionTitle>
6. Conclusions
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> In human dialogues, both the producer and the recipient of an utterance have a say in determining its interpretation. Moreover, they may both change their minds in the face of new information. Dialogue participants are able to negotiate the meaning of utterances because in responding to what the hearer decides are the speaker's goals and expectations regarding an utterance, the hearer also provides evidence of that decision and hence constraints on what the speaker may do next. If the speaker disagrees with a displayed interpretation, she can challenge it directly or decide to respond in such a way that the hearer must infer a misunderstanding.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> The long-term goal of our work is to construct a model of communicative interaction that will be able to support the negotiation of meaning. We have considered the information sources and reasoning processes that agents need to determine their beliefs about the goals and expectations associated with each other's utterances. Whereas previous models of dialogue tend to represent discourse meaning from some global perspective, make use of either purely structural or purely intentional information, and give minimal attention to repair, in our model: * Each agent has his or her own model of the discourse.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2">  previous utterances as well as expectations for future actions that are predicted by the utterance under interpretation.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> * Agents are able to detect and repair their own misunderstandings as well as those of others.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> We see this work as providing some of the first steps toward a unified account of interpretation, generation, and repair.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5"> The primary contributions of this work have been to treat misunderstanding and repair as intrinsic to conversants' core language abilities and to account for them with the same processing mechanisms that account for normal speech. In particular, both interpretation and repair are treated as explanation problems, modeled as abduction. In order to account for the repair of misunderstandings, we have proposed a representation of the discourse that captures the agent's interpretation of the conversation both before and after a repair and that is independent of the actual beliefs of the participants--a dynamic mental artifact that is the object of belief and repair. With such a record of the discourse, agents can refer to alternative interpretations or to the repair process itself, potentially enabling them to recover from rejected repairs. By addressing the problem of repair, this work should facilitate efforts to build natural language interfaces that can better recover from their own mistakes as well as those of their users.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
class="xml-element"></Paper>