Speech acts in electronic communication with special reference to KQML and ANSI X12
M.A. Covington · 2002
The paper examines the encoding of speech acts in KQML at length and in ANSI X12 briefly. KQML is a speech act based language developed with ARPA funding, and X12 is the American standard for electronic data interchange (EDI) message formats. The author concludes that although speech act theory is highly relevant to electronic communication, the needs of computers are different from those of humans. Computers need to perform concisely speech acts that are clumsy in human speech, such as arranging communication paths. They also need to recognize speech act types as immediately as possible, whereas human language gets along with clumsy encodings of speech acts into grammar.