Abstract
Communication in natural language requires a combination of language-specific and general common-sense reasoning capabilities, the ability to represent and reason about the beliefs, goals and plans of multiple agents, and the recognition that utterances are multifaceted. This paper evaluates the capabilities of natural language processing systems against these requirements and identifies crucial areas for future research in language processing, common-sense reasoning, and their coordination. Don Walker’s guiding hand can be seen in the two major premises of this paper — the importance of the communicative situation and of a consideration of language use — and in its argument for an interdisciplinary approach, as well as in the title. His strong support made the articulation of these then controversial views possible.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Allen, J. “A Plan-Based Approach to Speech Act Recognition,” Technical Report No. 131/79, Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto, 1979.
Appelt, D., B. Grosz, G. Hendrix, A. Robinson, “The representation and use of process knowledge,” Technical Note 207, Artificial Intelligence Center, SRI International, Menlo Park, CA, 1980.
Bobrow, D. et al., “GUS, A Frame Driven Dialog System,” Artificial Intelligence, 8, 1977, 155–173.
Bruce, B., D. Newman, “Interacting Plans,” Cognitive Science, 2, 1978, 195–233.
Carbonell, J., “Computer Models of Social and Political Reasoning,” Ph. D. Thesis, Yale University, New Haven, CT, 1979.
Chafe, W., “The Flow of Thought and the Flow of Language,” in T. Givón (ed.), Syntax and Semantics, 12, Academic Press, New York, 1978.
Clark, H., C. Marshall, “Definite Reference and Mutual Knowledge,” in A. Joshi, I. Sag, B. Webber (eds.), Elements of Discourse Understanding: Proceedings of a Workshop on Computational Aspects of Linguistic Structure and Discourse Setting, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, England, 1980.
Cohen, P., “On Knowing What to Say: Planning Speech Acts,” Technical Report No. 118, Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada, 1978.
Collins, A., “Studies of Plausible Reasoning,” Volume I, BBN Report No. 3810, Bolt Beranek and Newman, Cambridge, MA, 1978.
Donnellan, K., “Reference and Definite Descriptions,” in S. Schwartz (ed.), Naming, Necessity and Natural Kind, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, 1977, 42–65.
Genesereth, M., “Automated Consultation for Complex Computer Systems,” Ph.D. Thesis, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, 1978.
Goffman, E., Frame analysis, Harper, New York, 1974.
Goffman, E., “Response Cries,” Language, Vol. 54, 1978, 787–815.
Grosz, B., “The Representation and Use of Focus in Dialogue Understanding,” Technical Note 151, Artificial Intelligence Center, SRI International, Menlo Park, CA, 1977a.
Grosz, B., “The Representation and Use of Focus in a System for Understanding Dialogs,” Proceedings of the Fifth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Carnegie-Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, 1977b, 67–76.
Grosz, B., “Focusing and description in natural language dialogues,” in A. Joshi, I. Sag, B. Webber (eds.), Elements of Discourse Understanding: Proceedings of a Workshop on Computational Aspects of Linguistic Structure and Discourse Setting, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, England, 1980.
Grosz, B., G. Hendrix, “A Computational Perspective on Indefinite Reference,” presented at Sloan Workshop on Indefinite Reference, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA, December 1978. Also Technical Note No. 181, Artificial Intelligence Center, SRI International, Menlo Park, CA.
Halliday, M., “Language Structure and Language Function,” in J. Lyons (ed.), New Horizons in Linguistics, Penguin, 1970.
Halliday, M., “Structure and Function in Language,” presented at Symposium on Discourse and Syntax, University of California at Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, November 1977.
Hayes, P., “Some Association-Based Techniques for Lexical Disambiguation by Machine,” Doctoral Thesis, Ecole Polytechniques Federale de Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland, 1978.
Hendrix, G., E. Sacerdoti, D. Sagalowicz, J. Slocum, “Developing a Natural Language Interface to Complex Data,” ACM Transactions on Database Systems, Vol. 3, No. 2, June 1978, 105–147.
Hobbs, J., “A Computational Approach to Discourse Analysis,” Research Report 76–2, Department of Computer Sciences, City College, City University of New York, New York, NY, 1976.
Hobbs, J., “Conversation as Planned Behavior,” in Proceedings of the Sixth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, 1979.
Hobbs, J., J. Robinson, “Why Ask?” SRI Technical Note 169, SRI International, Menlo Park, CA, 1978.
Kasher, A., “Indefinite Reference: Indispensability of Pragmatics,” presented at Sloan Workshop on Indefinite Reference, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA, December 1978.
Labov, W., D. Fanshel, Therapeutic Discourse, Academic Press, New York, 1977.
Landsbergen, S., “Syntax and Formal Semantics of English in PHLIQAI,” in Coling 76, Preprints of the 6th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Ottawa,Ontario, Canada, June 28—July2, 1976, No. 21.
Levy, D., “Communicative Goals and Strategies: Between Discourse and Syntax,” in T. Givon (ed.), Syntax and Semantics, 12, Academic Press, New York, 1978.
Mann, W., J. Moore, J. Levin, “A comprehension model for human dialogue,” Proceedings of the Fifth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Carnegie-Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, 1977, 77–87.
McCarthy, J., “Programs with Common Sense,” in M. Minsky (ed.), Semantic Information Processing, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1968, 403–419.
McDermott, D., “Artificial Intelligence Meets Natural Stupidity,” SIGARTNewsletter, no. 57, 1976, 4–9.
Moore, R., “Reasoning about Knowledge and Actions,”, Ph.D. Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, 1979.
Morgan, J., “Two Types of Convention in Indirect Speech Acts”, in P. Cole (ed.), Syntax and Semantics, Vol. 9, Academic Press, New York, 1978.
Nilsson, N., Problem Solving Methods in Artificial Intelligence, McGraw-Hill, New York, 1971.
Novak, G., “Representations of knowledge in a program for solving physics problems,” Proceedings of the Fifth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Carnegie-Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, 1977, 286–291.
Pittenger, R., C. Hockett, J. Danehy, The First Five Minutes, Paul Martineau, Ithaca, NY, 1960.
Plath, W., “Request: A Natural Language Question-Answering System,” IBM Journal of Research and Development, 20, 4, 1976, 326–335.
Quine, W., Word and Object, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1960.
Reddy, D. et al, “Speech Understanding Systems: A Summary of Results of the Five-Year Research Effort,” Department of Computer Science, Carnegie-Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, 1977.
Rieger, C., “Conceptual Overlays: A Mechanism for the Interpretation of Sentence Meaning in Context,” Technical Report TR-354, Computer Science Department, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, 1975.
Robinson, A., “Understanding Natural-Language Utterances in Dialogs about Tasks,” Technical Note 210, SRI International, Menlo Park, CA, 1980a.
Robinson, A., “Interpreting Verb Phrase References in Dialogs,” in Proceedings of the Third Conference of The Canadian Society for Computational Studies of Intelligence, Victoria, British Columbia, May 14–16, 1980b.
Rubin, A., “A Theoretical Taxonomy of the Differences Between Oral and Written Language,” in R. Spiro et al. (eds.), Theoretical Issues in Reading Comprehension, Lawrence Erlbaum, Hillsdale, NJ, 1978.
Sacerdoti, E., A Structure for Plans and Behavior, Elsevier, NY, 1977.
Sacerdoti, E., “What Language Understanding Research Suggests about Distributed Artificial Intelligence,” Proceedings of a workshop held at Carnegie-Mellon University, December 7–8, 1978.
Sager, N., R. Grishman, “The Restriction Language for Computer Grammars,” Communications of the ACM, 18, 1975, 390–400.
Schank, R., and Yale A.I. Project 1975, “SAM—A story understander,” Research Report No. 43, Department of Computer Science, Yale University, New Haven, CT, 1975.
Schank, R., R. Abelson, Scripts, Plans, Goals, and Understanding, Laurence Erlbaum Associates, Hillsdale, NJ, 1977.
Schmidt, C., N.S. Sridharan, “Plan Recognition Using a Hypothesis and Revise Paradigm: An Example,” Proceedings of the Fifth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence,Carnegie-Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, 1977, 480486.
Searle, J., Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, England, 1969.
Sidner, C., “A Computational Model of Co-Reference Comprehension in English,” Ph. D. Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, 1979.
Walker, D. (ed.), Understanding Spoken Language, Elsevier North-Holland, NY, 1978.
Wilensky, R., “Understanding Goal-Based Stories,” Ph.D. Thesis, Yale University, New Haven, CT, 1978.
Woods, W. et al., “Speech Understanding Systems: Final Report,” BBN Report No. 3438, Bolt Beranek and Newman, Cambridge, MA, 1976.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1994 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Grosz, B. (1994). Utterance and Objective: Issues in Natural Language Communication. In: Zampolli, A., Calzolari, N., Palmer, M. (eds) Current Issues in Computational Linguistics: In Honour of Don Walker. Linguistica Computazionale, vol 9. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-585-35958-8_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-585-35958-8_3
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-0-7923-2998-5
Online ISBN: 978-0-585-35958-8
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive