Speech acts in a connected discourse: a computational representation based on conceptual graph theory

Abstract

Abstract The purpose of this research is to study how to represent speech acts within texts. We consider that conversations are temporal sequences of connected illocutionary acts which result in discourses. Using Searle and Vanderveken illocutionary logic, we propose an extension of Sowa's conceptual graph theory that enables us to represent the conceptual structure of conversations and to model the speech acts that are the basic units of communication in conversations. This approach enables us to represent explicitly several time coordinate systems which are underlying the use of temporal knowledge in discourses: the locutors’ temporal perspective; the localization of temporal situations (processes, events, states etc.); the utterance perspectives of agents who utter sentences. Within an utterance perspective, speakers use sentences with the intention to perform illocutionary acts whose propositional content is represented by conceptual graphs. Our approach also enables us to model several linguistic phe...