Using Speech Acts in Logic-Based Rhetorical Structuring for Natural Language Generation in Human-Computer Dialogue

Usually, human-computer dialogue systems rely on ad-hoc solutions for the component performing speech turn generation, in natural language. However, integration of taskspecific and general world knowledge in order to provide a more reliable and natural interaction with humans also through more sophisticated language generation techniques becomes needed. In this paper we present performance improvements of a module simulating in first-order logic Segmented Discourse Representation Theory for language generation in dialogue. These improvements concern reductions in computational costs and enhancements in rhetorical coherence for the discourse structures obtained, and are obtained using speech-act related information for driving rhetorical relations computations.