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An approach to the organization of knowledge for the modelling of conversation

University of British Columbia

Presented is a description of an approach to the modelling of conversation. It is suggested that to have any hope of succeeding at this endeavour, the problem must be tackled principally as a problem in pragmatics rather than as one in language analysis alone. Several pragmatic aspects of conversation are delineated and it is shown that the attempt to account for them raises a number of general issues in the representation of knowledge. A scheme for resolving some of these issues is constructed and given computational description as a set of (non-implemented) LISP-based control structures called |LISP. Central to this scheme are several different types of object that encode knowledge and communicate this knowledge by passing messages. One particular kind of object, the pattern expression (|PEXPR), turns out to be the most versatile. (|PEXPR) can encode an arbitrary amount of procedural or declarative information; are capable, as a by-product of their message passing behaviour of providing both a context for future processing decisions and a record of past processing decisions; and make contributions to the resolution of several artificial intelligence problems. A model of conversation is then proposed and some examples of typical conversations that might occur in the general context of attending a symphony concert are detailed in |LISP. It is suggested that conversation is goal oriented behaviour; and, in fact, the model is presented in terms of level of goal: from higher level non-linguistic goals through scripts directing both sides of a conversation, speech acts guiding one conversant's actions, and, finally, language level goals providing a basic parsing component for the model. In addition, a place is delineated for belief models of the conversants, necessary if utterances are to be properly understood or produced. The embedding of this kind of language model in a |LISP base yields a rich pragmatic environment for analyzing conversation.

Text

2010-02-22

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http://hdl.handle.net/2429/20736

Computer Science

University of British Columbia

Graduate