Misunderstanding and the negotiation of meaning using abduction

摘要

The approach described in the paper treats misunderstanding and repair as intrinsic to conversants' core language abilities, accountable by the same processing mechanisms that underlie normal speech. A unified theory has been developed by using default reasoning to generate utterances, and using abduction to characterize interpretation and repair. The model combines intentional and social accounts of discourse to capture the expectations that help constrain discourse, without requiring extended inference about participants' motivations when it is not needed. In intentional accounts, speakers use their beliefs, goals, and expectations to decide what to say; when they interpret an utterance, they identify goals and actions that might account for it. In sociological accounts provided by ethnomethodology, discourse interactions and the resolution of misunderstandings are normal activities guided by social conventions. The approach extends intentional accounts by using expectations deriving from social conventions in order to guide interpretation. This paper considers previous work on misunderstanding, provides an overview of the architecture of a new model, and examines how it accounts for an example repair.