Generating indirect answers to Yes-No questions
Nancy Green, Sandra Carberry · 1994
An indirect answer to a Yes-No question conversationally implicates the speaker's evaluation of the truth of the questioned proposition. We present the approach to generation used in our implemented system for generating and interpreting indirect answers to Yes-No questions in English. Generation of a discourse plan is performed in two phases: content planning and plan pruning. During content planning, stimulus conditions are used to trigger speaker goals to include appropriate extra information with the direct answer. Plan pruning determines what parts of this full response do not need to be stated explicitly - resulting in, in appropriate discourse contexts, the generation of an indirect answer.