Skip Navigation


Journal of Logic and Computation Advance Access originally published online on December 21, 2007
Journal of Logic and Computation 2008 18(3):431-457; doi:10.1093/logcom/exm073
This Article
Right arrow Abstract Freely available
Right arrow Full Text (PDF)
Right arrow Alert me when this article is cited
Right arrow Alert me if a correction is posted
Services
Right arrow Email this article to a friend
Right arrow Similar articles in this journal
Right arrow Alert me to new issues of the journal
Right arrow Add to My Personal Archive
Right arrow Download to citation manager
Right arrowRequest Permissions
Google Scholar
Right arrow Articles by Ramsay, A.
Right arrow Articles by Field, D.
Social Bookmarking
Add to CiteULike   Add to Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us  
What's this?

© The Author, 2007. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Original Articles

Speech Acts, Epistemic Planning and Grice's Maxims

Allan Ramsay

School of Computer Science, University of Manchester, M60 1QD, UK. E-mail: allan.ramsay{at}manchester.ac.uk

Debora Field

Department of Computer Science, University of Liverpool, L69 3BX, UK. E-mail: debora.field{at}liverpool.ac.uk

Work on speech acts has generally involved the introduction of sets of different actions such as informing, reminding, bluffing and lying. These actions have different preconditions and effects, and hence can be used to achieve a wide variety of different real-world goals. The problem is that they tend to have indistinguishable surface forms. As such, it is extremely difficult for the hearer to decide which action she thinks has been performed, and it is therefore also extremely difficult for the speaker to be confident about how the hearer will respond. We will show how to achieve complex goals on the basis of a very simple set of linguistic actions. These actions have clearly marked surface forms, and hence can easily be distinguishable by a hearer. In order to do this, we have developed an epistemic planner with a number of interesting features, and with a number of optimisations that relate directly to aspects of the task at hand.



References

  1. Searle JR. Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language (1969) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  2. Austin J. How to Do Things with Words (1962) Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  3. Allen JF, Perrault CR. Analysing intention in utterances. Artificial Intelligence (1980) 15:148–178.
  4. Cohen PR, Perrault CR. Elements of a plan-based theory of speech acts. Cognitive Science (1979) 7:171–190.[CrossRef]
  5. Cohen PR, Morgan J, Pollack ME. Intentions in Communication (1990) Cambridge, Mass.: Bradford Books.
  6. Bunt HC, Black WJ. Abduction, Beliefs and Context: Studies in Computational Pragmatics (2000) Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
  7. Bunt HC. Dialogue pragmatics and context specification. In: Abduction, Beliefs and Context: Studies in Computational Pragmatics—Bunt HC, Black WJ, eds. (2000) Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 81–151.
  8. Ramsay AM. Speech act theory and epistemic planning. In: Abduction, Beliefs and Context in Dialogue: Studies in Computational Pragmatics—Black WJ, Bunt HC, eds. (2000) Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 293–310.
  9. Lewis D. Scorekeeping in a language game, 1979. Journal of Philosophical Logic. 8:339–359. Reprinted in D. Lewis Philosophical Papers Volume I, 1983, pp.233–249. Oxford University Press, New York and Oxford.
  10. Field DG, Ramsay AM. Sarcasm, deception, and stating the obvious: planning dialogue without speech acts. Artificial Intelligence Review (2004) 22:149–171.[ISI]
  11. Michie D. Memo functions and machine learning. Nature (1968) 218:19–22.[CrossRef]
  12. Boyer RS, Moore JS. A theorem prover for a computational logic. In: Proceedings 10th International Conference on Automated Deduction, Kaiserslautern (Germany)—Stickel M, ed. (1990) Volume 449. Kaiserslautern: Springer-Verlag. 1–15.
  13. Carbonell JG. Derivational analogy and its role in problem-solving. In: Proceedings of the AAAI (3) (1983) Washington, D.C. 64–69.
  14. Veloso MM, Carbonell JG. Case-based reasoning in PRODIGY. In: Machine Learning: A Multistrategy Approach, Volume IV—Michalski RS, Teccuci G, eds. (1994) San Mateo, California: Morgan Kaufmann. 523–548.
  15. Ramsay AM. Does it make any sense? updating = consistency checking. In: The Semantics-Pragmatics Interface from Different Points of View—Turner K, ed. (1999) London and Amsterdam: Elsevier.
  16. Bunt HC, Kievit L, Muskens R, Verlinden M. Dynamic and underspecified semantics without dynamic and underspecified logic. In: Computing Meaning I, Volume 73 of Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy (1999) Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. 208–220.
  17. Ramsay AM, Seville HL. Models and discourse models. Journal of Language and Computation (2000) 1:167–181.
  18. Bunt HC, Thijsse E. Inference and computational semantics. In: 3rd International Workshop on Computational Semantics (1997) University of Tilburg. 5–19.
  19. Hirst G. Semantic Interpretation and the Resolution of Ambiguity (1987) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Studies in natural language processing.
  20. Ramsay AM. Theorem proving for untyped constructive {lambda}-calculus: implementation and application. Logic Journal of the Interest Group in Pure and Applied Logics (2001) 9:89–106.
  21. Sussman GJ. A Computational Model of Skill Acquisition (1975) New York: American Elsevier.
  22. Tate A. Generating project networks. International Joint Conference on Articificial Intelligence (1977) Volume 5. Cambridge, MA. 888–893.
  23. Sacerdoti ED. Planning in a hierarchy of abstraction spaces. Artificial Intelligence (1974) 5:115–135.[CrossRef][ISI]
  24. Stefik M. Planning and meta-planning (MOLGEN: Part 2). Artificial Intelligence (1981) 16:141–170.[CrossRef][ISI]
  25. Blum A, Furst ML. Fast planning through planning graph analysis. Artificial Intelligence (1997) 90:281–300.[CrossRef][ISI]
  26. Lusk R, Overbeek R. Satchmo: a theorem prover in Prolog. (1988) Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Automated Deduction (CADE-9), Volume 310 of Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence. Berlin: Springer-Verlag. 415–434.
  27. Davis M, Putnam H. A computing procedure for quantification theory. Journal of the Association for Computing Machinery (1960) 7:201–215.
  28. Ramsay AM. Generating relevant models. Journal of Automated Reasoning (1991) 7:359–368.[CrossRef]
  29. Loveland DW. Near-horn Prolog and beyond. Journal of Automated Reasoning (1991) 7:1–26.
  30. Dunn JM, Epstein G. A useful four-valued logic. In: Modern Uses of Multiple-Valued Logic (1977) Dordrecht: D. Reidel. 8–37.
  31. Voorbraak F. On the justification of Dempster's rule of combination. Artificial Intelligence (1991) 48:171–197.[CrossRef][ISI]
  32. Konolige K. A Deduction Model of Belief (1986) London: Pitman.
  33. Hintikka J. Knowledge and Belief: An Introduction to the Two Notions (1962) New York: Cornell University Press.
  34. Kowalski R. A proof procedure using connection graphs. JACM (1975) 22:572–595.[CrossRef]
  35. Ramsay AM, Gaylard HL. Relevant answers to WH-questions. Journal of Language, Logic and Information (2004) 13:173–186.[CrossRef]
  36. Reiter R. A logic for default reasoning. Artificial Intelligence (1980) 13:81–132.[CrossRef][ISI]
  37. Wedekind J. On inference-based procedures for lexical disambiguation. In: Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING-96)—Tsujii J.-I, ed. (1996) Copenhagen. 980–985.
  38. Asher N, Lascarides A. Lexical disambiguation in a discourse context. In: Journal of Semantics (1995) 12.1. Oxford University Press. 69–108.
  39. Pustejovsky J. The semantics of lexical underspecification. Folia Linguistica (1998) 32:323–347.[ISI]
  40. Dowty DR. Word Meaning and Montague Grammar (1979) Dordrecht: D. Reidel.
  41. Brennan SE, Friedman MW, Pollard CJ. A centering approach to pronouns. (1987) Proceedings of 25th meeting of the ACL: Stanford, California.
  42. Grosz BJ, Joshi A, Weinstein S. Centering: a framework for modeling the local coherence of discourse. Computational Linguistics (1995) 21:175–204.
  43. Walker MA, Joshi AK, Prince EF. Formal systems for complexity and control of inference: a reprise and some hints. In: Centering Theory in Discourse (1998) Oxford University Press: Oxford. 31–38.
  44. Seville HL. Experiments with discourse structure. In: 3rd International Workshop on Computational Semantics—Bunt HC, Thijsse EGC, eds. (1999) University of Tilburg. 233–247.
  45. Seville HL, Ramsay AM. Reference-based discourse structure for reference resolution. In: ACL Workshop on Discourse/Dialogue Structure and Reference (1999) June. University of Maryland. 90–99.
  46. Ginzburg J. Resolving questions I. Linguistics and Philosophy (1995) 18:459–527.[CrossRef][ISI]
  47. Larsson S. Questions under discussion and dialogue moves. In: Twendial'98 (1998) The Netherlands: Twente.
  48. Field DG, Ramsay AM. How to build towers of arbitrary heights. In: The 23rd Annual Workshop of the UK Planning and Scheduling Special Interest Group (PlanSIG 2004) (2004) University College Cork.
  49. Field DG, Ramsay AM. Planning ramifications: when ramifications are the norm, not the problem. In: 11th International Workshop on Non-monotonic Reasoning (NMR-06) (2006) Ambleside. 344–351. AAAI.
  50. Weizenbaum J, Eliza. Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery (CACM) (1966) 9:36–45.
  51. Colby KM. Artificial Paranoia: A Computer Simulation of Paranoid Processes (1976) New York: Pergamon.

Add to CiteULike CiteULike   Add to Connotea Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us Del.icio.us    What's this?



This Article
Right arrow Abstract Freely available
Right arrow Full Text (PDF)
Right arrow Alert me when this article is cited
Right arrow Alert me if a correction is posted
Services
Right arrow Email this article to a friend
Right arrow Similar articles in this journal
Right arrow Alert me to new issues of the journal
Right arrow Add to My Personal Archive
Right arrow Download to citation manager
Right arrowRequest Permissions
Google Scholar
Right arrow Articles by Ramsay, A.
Right arrow Articles by Field, D.
Social Bookmarking
Add to CiteULike   Add to Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us  
What's this?