Informational Redundancy and Resource Bounds in Dialogue
Marilyn A. Walker, Marilyn A. Walker, F. Prince, Mark Steedman · Scholarly Commons (University of Pennsylvania) · 1993
INFORMATIONAL REDUNDANCY AND RESOURCE BOUNDS IN DIALOGUE Marilyn A. Walker Aravind K. Joshi and Ellen F. Prince (cosupervisors) This thesis investigates the relationship between language behavior and agents' resource bounds by examining the use of informationally redundant utterances (IRUs) in problem-solving dialogues. The content of an IRU is a proposition that the conversants already know or could infer. Since communication is a subcase of action, the existence of IRUs is a paradox because IRUs appear to be actions whose effects have already been achieved. The explication of the paradox of IRUs has ramifications for models of action in general and of dialogue in particular. I argue that IRUs can only be explained by a processing model of dialogue that reflects agents' autonomy and limited attentional and inferential capacity. The central thesis is that the communicative function of IRUs is related to the cognitive properties of resource-limited agents. In order to investigate this i...