Speech Act and Natural Language Processing
FU Xi-tao · 2004
Speech act theory thinks to say something means to do something, and speaking and understanding both being speech acts. The principle of computer imitates the human brain, therefore, natural language processing is supposed to be an imitation of human speech acts. Currently most natural language processing systems are based on syntactic and semantic theories of human language. But speech act theory provides a complete new perspective for it: natural language processing is essentially a speech act, to achieve much more in its research, pragmatic theory such as speech act must be focused on, without excluding syntactic and semantic theories.