The repair of speech act misunderstandings by abductive inference
Susan McRoy, Graeme Hirst · 1995
this paper, we have concentrated on the repair of mis-understanding. Our colleagues Heeman and Edmonds have looked at the repair of non-understanding. The difference between the two situations is that in the former, the agent derives exactly one interpretation of an utterance and hence is initially unaware of any problem; in the latter, the agent derives either more than one interpretation, with no way to choose between them, or no interpretation at all, and so the problem is immediately apparent. Heeman and Edmonds looked in particular at cases in which a referring expression uttered by one conversant was not understood by the other (Heeman and Hirst 1995; Edmonds 1994; Hirst et. al. 1994). Clark and his colleagues (Clark and Wilkes-Gibbs 1986; Clark 1993) have shown that in such situations, conversants will collaborate on repairing the problem by, in effect, negotiating a reconstruction or elaboration of the referring expression. Heeman and Edmonds model this with a plan recognition and generation system that can recognize faulty plans and try to repair them. Thus (as in our own model) two copies of the system can converse with each other, negotiating referents of referring expressions that are not understood by trying to recognize the referring plans of the other, repairing them where necessary, and presenting the new referring plan to the other for approval.