Misunderstanding and the negotiation of meaning
نویسنده
چکیده
Most computational accounts of dialogue have assumed that once listeners have interpreted an utterance, they never change this interpretation. However, human interactions routinely violate this assumption. This is because people are necessarily limited in how much information they can make explicit. As a result, misunderstandings might occur--discourse participants might differ in their beliefs about the meaning of what has been said or about its relevance to the discourse. To address this possibility, participants rely in part on their expectations to determine whether they have understood each other. If a speaker fails to notice anything unusual, she may assume that the conversation is proceeding smoothly. But if she hears something that seems inconsistent with her expectations, she may hypothesize that there has been a misunderstanding and attempt to reinterpret part of the discourse, initiating a repair. In other words, speakers’ inferences about discourse are nonmonotonic, because speakers may learn things that conflict with their earlier reasoning and cause them to re-evaluate what happened before. Because their utterances can only make a limited amount of information explicit, discourse participants’ can only surmise-abduce--each other’s intentions. They must reason from observed utterances to causes or goals that might account for them.
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