Session 11 Natural Language III

Allen presented "Using Structural Constraints for Speech Act Interpretation" by Allen and Hinkleman. The paper discusses ways to distinguish an indirect speech act such as "Can you pass the salt?" from a direct yes-no question. It is important that a speech understanding system be able to distinguish the two; given an indirect question such as "Can you tell me how many ships are in the Bering Sea?", the system should not repsond with "yes" . Hinkleman, in her recently completely thesis, has proposed a number of rules such as: " I f the sentence contains the adverb 'please,' than the possible interpretation is: 'directive-command.' " In the oral presentation, Allen also suggested that there might be some intonational cues that could be useful. This is an interesting possibility that we ought to think about.