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<Paper uid="C92-1043">
  <Title>ACTION RELATIONS IN RATIONALE CLAUSES AND MEANS CLAUSES*</Title>
  <Section position="3" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Communication among agents collaborating on a task often involves complex utterances about multiple actions, as illustrated in the following example: By going and getting the key and then coining and unlocking the grate, for that you get a ccrtain number of points, and then as you collect treasures, you get more points. \[1\] Multi-action utterances like these present two particular challenges for natural language interpretation systems: determining an appropriate representation of their meaning, and defining the process by which this representation can be derived from natural language utterances. Substantial work has been done on the development of logical forms as a necessary step toward the goal of representing the meaning of an utterance.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> However, very little is yet established on the representation of the information communicated in complex action utterances like the one given above, and still less on the interpretation of thc relations tbat connect the actions described in these utterances.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> In this paper, we analyze two particular multi-action constructions, utterances with rationale clauses and utterances with means clauses, illustrated respectively in (la) and (tb) below, with the goal of meeting, at *I would like to thank Barbara Grosz, Andrew I(ehler, l(aren Lochbaum, Stuart Shieber and Candy Sidner for helpful comments regarding tiffs paper. This researdt has I)een supported by U S WEST Advanced Technologies, by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research under Contract No.AFOSR-89-0273, and by an IBM Graduate Fellowshila.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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