Pragmatic modeling: toward a robust natural language interface

Abstract

One of the most important ways in which an information‐provider can assimilate an information‐seeking dialogue is by inferring the underlying task‐related plan motivating the information‐seeker's queries. This paper presents a strategy for hypothesizing and tracking the changing task‐level goals of an information‐seeker and building a model of his task‐related plan as the dialogue progresses.Naturally occurring utterances are often imperfect. The information‐provider often appears to use acquired knowledge about the information‐seeker's underlying task‐related plan to remedy many of the information‐seeker's faulty utterances and enable the dialogue to continue without interruption. This paper presents a strategy for understanding one kind of defective utterance. Our approach relies on the information‐seeker's inferred task‐related plan as the primary mechanism for suggesting how an utterance should be understood, thereby considering only interpretations that are relevant to what the information‐seeker is trying to accomplish. If multiple interpretations are suggested, relevance to the current focus of attention in the dialogue and similarity to the information‐seeker's actual utterance are used to select the interpretation that is most likely to represent his intended meaning or satisfy his needs.