For people to contribute to discourse, they must do more than utter the right sentence at the right time. The basic requirement is that they odd to their common ground in on orderly way. To do this, we argue, they try to establish for each utterance the mutual belief that the addressees hove understood what the speaker meant well enough for current purposes. This is accomplished by the collective actions of the current contributor and his or her partners, and these result in units of conversation called contributions. We present a model of contributions and show how it accounts for o variety of features of everyday conversations.

We introduce an architecture and toolkit for building dialogue managers currently being developed in the TRINDI project, based on the notions of information state and dialogue move engine. The aim is to provide a framework for experimenting with implementations of di erent theories of information state, information state update and dialogue control. Anumber of dialogue managers are currently being built using the toolkit, and we present a detailed look at one of them. We believe that this framework will make implementation of dialogue processing theories easier, also facilitating comparison of di erent types of dialogue systems, thus helping to achieve a prerequisite for arriving at a best practice for the development of the dialogue management component ofaspoken dialogue system. 1

The paper proposes a theory relating syntax, semantics, and intonational prosody, and covering a wide range of English intonational tunes and their semantic interpretation in terms of focus and information structure. The theory is based on a version of combinatory categorial grammar which directly pairs phonological and logical forms without intermediary representational levels.

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3.672> X with the complex term 1 + 1, not with 2, which, for people unused to Prolog's little ways, tends to come as a bit of a surprise. If we want to carry out the actual arithmetic involved, we have to explicitly force evaluation by making use of the very special inbuilt `operator' is/2. This calls an inbuilt mechanism which carries out the arithmetic evaluation of its second argument, and then unication plays no role here!). On the other hand, \== checks whether its argument are not identical. Arithmetic Prolog contains some built-in operators for handling integer arithmetic. These include *, / +, - (for multiplication, division, addition, and subtraction, respectively) and >, < for comparing numbers. These symbols, however, are just ordinary Prolog operators. That is, they are just a user friendly notation for writing

In conversation speakers design their utterances to be understood against the common ground they share with their addressees-their common experience, expertise, dialect, and culture. That ordinarily gives addressees an advantage over overhearers in understanding. Addressees have an additional advantage, we pro-pose, because they can actively collaborate with speakers in reaching the mutual belief that they have understood what was said, whereas overhearers cannot. As evidence for the proposal, we looked at triples of people in which one person told another person in conversation how to arrange 12 complex figures while an over-hearer tried to arrange them too. All three began as strangers with the same background information. As predicted, addressees were more accurate at arrang-ing the figures than overhearers even when the overhearers heard every word. Other evidence suggests that the very process of understanding is different for addressees and overhearers. 8 1989 Acadermc Press, Inc. People understand each other in conversations by gathering evidence about each other’s intentions. How do they do that? The traditional view, which we will call the autonom&s view, is that they listen to the words uttered, decode them, and interpret them against what they take to be the common ground of the participants in the conversation (e.g., Anderson,

For many linguists interested in pragmatics, including the Prague School theorists,

This paper examines demonstrative pronouns used as deictics to refer to the interpretation of one or more clauses. Although this usage is frowned upon in style manuals (for example Strunk and White (1959) state that “This. The pronoun this, referring to the complete sense of a preceding sentence or clause, cannot always carry the load and so may produce an imprecise statement.”), it is nevertheless very common in written text. Handling this usage poses a problem for Natural Language Understanding systems. The solution I propose is based on distinguishing between what can be pointed to and what can be referred to by virtue of pointing. I argue that a restricted set of discourse segments yield what such demonstrative pronouns can point to and a restricted set of what Nunberg (1979) has called referring functions yield what they can refer to by virtue of that pointing.

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This paper presents an analysis of purpose clauses in the context of instruction understanding. Such analysis shows that goals affect the interpretation and / or execution of actions, lends support to the proposal of using generation and enablement to model relations between actions, and sheds light on some inference processes necessary to interpret purpose clauses.