<?xml version="1.0" standalone="yes"?>
<Paper uid="P94-1006">
  <Title>INTENTIONS AND INFORMATION IN DISCOURSE</Title>
  <Section position="3" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
INTRODUCTION
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> The flow of inference between communicative intentions and domain information is often essential to discourse processing. It is well reflected in this discourse from Moore and Pollack (1992): (1)a. George Bush supports big business.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> b. He's sure to veto House Bill 1711.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> There are at least three different interpretations. Consider Context 1: in this context the interpreter I believes that the author A wants to convince him that (lb) is true. For example, the context is one in which I has already uttered Bush won't veto any more bills.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> I reasons that A's linguistic behavior was intentional, and therefore that A believes that by saying (la) he will convince I that Bush will veto the bill. Even if I believed nothing about the bill, he now infers it's bad for big business. So we have witnessed an inference from premises that involve the desires and beliefs of A (Moore and Pollack's &amp;quot;intentional structure&amp;quot;), as well as his linguistic behavior, to a conclusion about domain information (Moore and Pollack's &amp;quot;informational structure&amp;quot;). null Now consider Context 2: in this context I knows that A wants to convince him of (la). As in Context 1, I may infer that the bill is bad for big business. But now, (lb) is used to support (la).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> Finally, consider Context 3: in this context I knows that House Bill 1711 is bad for big business, but doesn't know A's communicative desires prior to witnessing his linguistic behaviour. From his beliefs about tile domain, he infers that supporting big business would cause Bush to veto this bill. So, A must. have uttered (la) to support (lb). Hence I realises that A wan~ed him to believe (lb). So in contrast to Contexts 1 and 2, we have a flow of inference from informational structure to intentional structure.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5"> This story makes two main points. First, we agree with Moore and Pollack that we must represent both the intentional import and the informational import of a discourse. As they show, this is a problem for current formulations of Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) (Thompson and Mann, 1987). Second, we go further than Moore and Pollack, and argue that reasoning about beliefs and desires exploits different rules and axioms from those used to infer rhetorical relations. Thus, we should represent intentional structure and discourse structure separately. But we postulate rhetorical relations that express the discourse function of the constituents in the communicative plan of the author, and we permit interaction between reasoning about rhetorical relations and reasoning about beliefs and desires. This paper provides the first steps towards a formal analysis of the interaction between intentional structure and informational structure. Our framework for discourse structure analysis is SDRT (Asher 1993). The basic representational structures of that theory may be used to characterise cognitive states. We will extend the logical engine used to infer rhetorical relations--DiCE (Lascarides and Asher 1991, 1993a, 1993b, Lascarides and Oberlander 1993)--to model inferences about intentional structure and its interaction with informational structure.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
class="xml-element"></Paper>