article

Free access

A process model for recognizing communicative acts and modeling negotiation subdialogues

Authors:

Sandra Carberry,

Lynn LambertAuthors Info & Claims

Computational Linguistics, Volume 25, Issue 1

Pages 1 - 53

Published: 01 March 1999 Publication History

Abstract

Negotiation is an important part of task-oriented expert-consultation dialogues. This paper presents a plan-based model for understanding cooperative negotiation subdialogues. Our system infers both the communicative actions that people pursue when speaking and the beliefs underlying these actions. Beliefs, and the strength of these beliefs, are recognized from the surface from of utterances, from discourse acts, and from the explicit and implicit acceptance of previous utterances. Our algorithm for recognizing discourse actions combines linguistic, world, and contextual knowledge in a unified framework. By combining these different knowledge sources, we are able to recognize complex discourse acts such as expressing doubt, to identify the relationship of utterances to one another, and to model negotiation subdialogues. Since negotiation is an integral part of multiagent activity, our process model addresses an important aspect of cooperative interaction and thus is a step toward an intelligent and robust natural language consultation system.

References

[1]

Allen, James. 1979. A Plan-Based Approach to Speech Act Recognition. Ph. D. thesis, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.]]

Digital Library

[2]

Allen, James and C. Raymond Perrault. 1980. Analyzing intention in utterances. Artificial Intelligence, 15:143--178.]]

[3]

Allen, James and Lenhart Schubert. 1991. The trains project. Technical Report 91-1, Department of Computer Science, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY.]]

[4]

Ballim, Afzal and Yorick Wilks. 1991. Beliefs, stereotypes, and dynamic agent modeling. User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction, 1(1):33--36.]]

[5]

Bartelt, Margaret. 1996. A computer program that recognizes rejected questions computationally. In Proceedings of NCUR-10, pages 989--993.]]

[6]

Birnbaum, Lawrence, Margot Flowers, and Rod McGuire. 1980. Towards an AI model of argumentation. In Proceedings of the First National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, pages 306--309.]]

[7]

Bonarini, Andrea, Ernesto Cappelletti, and Antonio Corrao. 1990. Network-based management of subjective judgements: A proposal accepting cyclic dependencies. Technical Report 90-067, Dipartimento di Elettronica, Politecnico di Milano, Milano, Italy.]]

[8]

Carberry, Sandra. 1985. A pragmatics based approach to understanding intersentential ellipsis. In Proceedings of the 23rd Annual Meeting, pages 188--197. Association for Computational Linguistics.]]

Digital Library

[9]

Carberry, Sandra. 1987. Pragmatic modeling: Toward a robust natural language interface. Computational Intelligence, 3:117--136.]]

[10]

Carberry, Sandra. 1988. Modeling the user's plans and goals. Computational Linguistics, 14(3):23--37.]]

Digital Library

[11]

Carberry, Sandra. 1989. A Pragmatics-Based Approach to Ellipsis Resolution. Computational Linguistics, 15(2):75--96.]]

Digital Library

[12]

Carberry, Sandra. 1990. Plan Recognition in Natural Language Dialogue. ACL-MIT Press Series on Natural Language Processing. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.]]

Digital Library

[13]

Carberry, Sandra, Jennifer Chu-Carroll, and Lynn Lambert. 1996. Modeling intention: Issues for spoken language dialogue systems. In Proceedings of the International Symposium on Spoken Dialogue, pages 13--24.]]

[14]

Cawsey, Alison, Julia Galliers, Steven Reece, and Karen Sparck Jones. 1992. Automating the librarian: A fundamental approach using belief revision. Technical Report 243, University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory, Cambridge, England.]]

[15]

Chu-Carroll, Jennifer and Sandra Carberry. 1994. A plan-based model for response generation in collaborative task-oriented dialogues. In Proceedings of the Twelfth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, pages 799--805.]]

Digital Library

[16]

Chu-Carroll, Jennifer and Sandra Carberry. 1995a. Generating information-sharing subdialogues in expert-user consultation. In Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, pages 1,243--1,250.]]

[17]

Chu-Carroll, Jennifer and Sandra Carberry. 1995b. Response generation in collaborative negotiation. In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Meeting, pages 136--143. Association for Computational Linguistics.]]

Digital Library

[18]

Chu-Carroll, Jennifer and Sandra Carberry. 1998. Collaborative response generation in planning dialogues. Computational Linguistics, 24(3):355--400.]]

Digital Library

[19]

Clark, Herbert and Edward Schaefer. 1989. Contributing to discourse. Cognitive Science, pages 259--294.]]

[20]

Clark, Herbert and Deanna Wilkes-Gibbs. 1990. Referring as a collaborative process. In Philip Cohen, Jerry Morgan, and Martha Pollack, editors, Intentions in Communication. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, pages 463--493.]]

[21]

Cohen, Paul R. 1985. Heuristic Reasoning about Uncertainty: An Artificial Intelligence Approach. Pitman Publishing Company.]]

Digital Library

[22]

Cohen, Philip and Hector Levesque. 1990a. Intention is choice with commitment. Artificial Intelligence, 42:213--261.]]

Digital Library

[23]

Cohen, Philip and Hector Levesque. 1990b. Persistence, intention, and commitment. In Philip Cohen, Jerry Morgan, and Martha Pollack, editors, Intentions in Communication. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, pages 33--70.]]

[24]

Cohen, Philip and Hector Levesque. 1990c. Rational interaction as the basis for communication. In Philip Cohen, Jerry Morgan, and Martha Pollack, editors, Intentions in Communication. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, pages 221--256.]]

[25]

Cohen, Philip and Hector Levesque. 1991a. Confirmations and joint action. In Proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, pages 951--957.]]

[26]

Cohen, Philip and Hector Levesque. 1991b. Teamwork. Technical Report 504, SRI International, Menlo Park, California.]]

[27]

Cohen, Philip and C. Raymond Perrault. 1979. Elements of a plan-based theory of speech acts. Cognitive Science, 3:177--212.]]

Digital Library

[28]

Cohen, Robin. 1987. Analyzing the structure of argumentative discourse. Computational Linguistics, 13(1-2):11--24.]]

Digital Library

[29]

Cohen, Robin and Mark Anthony Young. 1991. Determining intended evidence relations in natural language arguments. Computational Intelligence, 7:110--118.]]

Digital Library

[30]

Columbia University Transcripts. 1985. Transcripts derived from audiotape conversations made at Columbia University, New York, NY. Provided by Kathleen McKeown.]]

[31]

DeKleer, Johan. 1986. An assumption-based TMS. Artificial Intelligence, 28:269--301.]]

Digital Library

[32]

Driankov, Dimiter. 1988. Towards a Many-Valued Logic of Quantified Belief. Ph.D. thesis, Linkoping University, Department of Computer and Information Science, Linkoping, Sweden.]]

[33]

Elzer, Stephanie. 1995. The role of user preferences and problem-solving knowledge in plan recognition for expert consultation systems. In Proceedings of the IJCAI Workshop on the Next Generation of Plan Recognition Systems, pages 37--41.]]

[34]

Flowers, Margot and Michael E. Dyer. 1984. Really arguing with your computer. In Proceedings of the National Computer Conference, pages 653--659.]]

[35]

Flowers, Margot, Rod McGuire, and Lawrence Birnbaum. 1982. Adversary arguments and the logic of personal attack. In W. Lehnert and M. Ringle, editors, Strategies for Natural Language Processing. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Hillsdale, NJ, pages 275--294.]]

[36]

Galliers, Julia Rose. 1991. Belief revision and a theory of communication. Technical Report 193, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, England.]]

[37]

Galliers, Julia Rose. 192. Autonomous belief revision and communication. In P. Gardenfors, editor, Belief Revision, Cambridge tracts in theoretical computer science. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, England.]]

[38]

Grosz, Barbara, Aravind K. Joshi, and Scott Weinstein. 1995. Centering: A framework for modeling the local coherence of discourse. Computational Linguistics, 21(2):203--225.]]

Digital Library

[39]

Grosz, Barbara and Candace Sidner. 1986. Attention, intentions, and the structure of discourse. Computational Linguistics, 12(3):175--204.]]

Digital Library

[40]

Grosz, Barbara and Candace Sidner. 1990. Plans for discourse. In Philip Cohen, Jerry Morgan, and Martha Pollack, editors, Intentions in Communication. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, pages 417--444.]]

[41]

Harry Gross Transcripts. 1982. Transcripts derived from tapes of the radio talk show Harry Gross: Speaking of your money. Provided by the Dept. of Computer Science at the University of Pennsylvania.]]

[42]

Heeman, Peter. 1991. A computational model of collaboration on referring expressions. Master's thesis, University of Toronto, September. Also Technical Report CSRI-251.]]

[43]

Hinkelman, Elizabeth. 1989. Two constraints on speech act ambiguity. In Proceedings of the 27th Annual Meeting, pages 212--219. Association for Computational Linguistics.]]

Digital Library

[44]

Hirschberg, Julia and Diane Litman. 1987. Now let's talk about now. In Proceedings of the 25th Annual Meeting, pages 163--171. Association for Computational Linguistics.]]

Digital Library

[45]

Joshi, Aravind K. 1982. Mutual beliefs in question-answer systems. In N. Smith, editor, Mutual Beliefs. Academic Press, NY, pages 181--197.]]

[46]

Kautz, Henry. 1990. A circumscriptive theory of plan recognition. In Philip Cohen, Jerry Morgan, and Martha Pollack, editors, Intentions in Communication. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, pages 105--133.]]

[47]

Knott, Alistair and Robert Dale. 1994. Using linguistic phenomena to motivate a set of coherence relations. Discourse Processes, 18(1):35--62.]]

[48]

Knott, Alistair and Chris Mellish. 1996. A feature-based account of the relations signalled by sentence and clause connectives. Language and Speech, 39(2-3):143--183.]]

[49]

Lambert, Lynn. 1993. Recognizing Complex Discourse Acts: A Tripartite Plan-Based Model of Dialogue. Ph.D. thesis, University of Delaware, June.]]

Digital Library

[50]

Lambert, Lynn and Sandra Carberry. 1991. A tripartite plan-based model of dialogue. In Proceedings of the 29th Annual Meeting, pages 47--54. Association for Computational Linguistics.]]

Digital Library

[51]

Lambert, Lynn and Sandra Carberry. 1992. Modeling negotiation subdialogues. In Proceedings of the 30th Annual Meeting, pages 193--200. Association for Computational Linguistics.]]

Digital Library

[52]

Lewis, D. 1979. Scorekeeping in a language game. Journal of Philosophical Logic, 8:339--359.]]

[53]

Litman, Diane and James Allen. 1987. A plan recognition model for subdialogues in conversation. Cognitive Science, 11:163--200.]]

[54]

Litman, Diane and Julia Hirschberg. 1990. Disambiguating cue phrases in text and speech. In Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 251--256.]]

Digital Library

[55]

Lochbaum, Karen. 1991. An algorithm for plan recognition in collaborative discourse. In Proceedings of the 29th Annual Meeting, pages 33--38. Association for Computational Linguistics.]]

Digital Library

[56]

Lochbaum, Karen. 1994. Using Collaborative Plans to Model the Intentional Structure of Discourse. Ph.D. thesis, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. Technical Report: TR-25-94.]]

Digital Library

[57]

Lochbaum, Karen, Barbara Grosz, and Candace Sidner. 1990. Models of plans to support communication: An initial report. In Proceedings of the Eighth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, pages 485--490.]]

[58]

Marcu, Daniel. 1997. The rhetorical parsing of natural language text. In Proceedings of the 35th Annual Meeting, pages 96--103. Association for Computational Linguistics.]]

Digital Library

[59]

McGuire, Rod, Lawrence Birnbaum, and Margot Flowers. 1981. Opportunistic processing in arguments. In Proceedings of the 1981 International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, pages 58--60.]]

[60]

McKeown, Kathleen R. 1983. Focus constraints on language generation. In Proceedings of the Third National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, pages 582--587.]]

[61]

McRoy, Susan and Graeme Hirst. 1995. The repair of speech act misunderstandings by abductive inference. Computational Linguistics, 21(4):435--478.]]

Digital Library

[62]

Perrault, Raymond. 1990. An application of default logic to speech act theory. In Philip Cohen, Jerry Morgan, and Martha Pollack, editors, Intentions in Communication. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, pages 161--185.]]

[63]

Perrault, Raymond and James Allen. 1980. A plan-based analysis of indirect speech acts. American Journal of Computational Linguistics, 6(3-4):167--182.]]

Digital Library

[64]

Polanyi, Livia. 1986. The linguistic discourse model: Towards a formal theory of discourse structure. Technical Report 6409, Bolt Beranek and Newman Laboratories Inc., Cambridge, MA.]]

[65]

Pollack, Martha. 1990. Plans as complex mental attitudes. In Philip Cohen, Jerry Morgan, and Martha Pollack, editors, Intentions in Communication. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, pages 77--104.]]

[66]

Quilici, Alexander. 1991. The Correction Machine: A Computer Model of Recognizing and Producing Belief Justifications in Argumentative Dialogs. Ph.D. thesis, Department of Computer Science, University of California at Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA.]]

Digital Library

[67]

Ramshaw, Lance A. 1989. A Metaplan model for problem-solving discourse. In Proceedings of the Fourth Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 35--42.]]

Digital Library

[68]

Reichman, Rachel. 1978. Conversational coherency. Cognitive Science, 2:283--327.]]

[69]

Reichman, Rachel. 1981. Modeling informal debates. In Proceedings of the 1981 International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, pages 19--24.]]

[70]

Reichman, Rachel. 1985. Getting Computers to Talk Like You and Me. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.]]

Digital Library

[71]

Reithinger, Norbert and Elisabeth Maier. 1995. Utilizing statistical dialogue act processing in verbmobil. In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Meeting, pages 116--121. Association for Computational Linguistics.]]

Digital Library

[72]

Rosé, Carolyn Penstein, Barbara Di Eugenio, Lori Levin, and Carol Van Ess-Dykema. 1995. Discourse processing of dialogues with multiple threads. In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Meeting, pages 31--38. Association for Computational Linguistics.]]

Digital Library

[73]

Schegloff, Emanuel and Harvey Sachs. 1973. Opening up closings. Semiotica, 8:289--327.]]

[74]

Schiffrin, Deborah. 1987. Discourse Markers. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, England.]]

[75]

Searle, John. 1970. Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge University Press, London, England.]]

[76]

Searle, John. 1990. Collective Intentions and Actions. In Philip Cohen, Jerry Morgan, and Martha Pollack, editors, Intentions in Communication. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, pages 401--416.]]

[77]

SRI Transcripts. 1992. Transcripts derived from audiotape conversations made at SRI International, Menlo Park, CA. Prepared by Jacqueline Kowtko under the direction of Patti Price.]]

[78]

Thomason, Richmond. 1990. Accommodation, meaning, and implicature: Interdisciplinary foundations for pragmatics. In Philip Cohen, Jerry Morgan, and Martha Pollack, editors, Intentions in Communication. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, pages 325--363.]]

[79]

Traum, David. 1994. A Computational Theory of Grounding in Natural Language Conversation. Ph.D. thesis, University of Rochester.]]

Digital Library

[80]

Traum, David and Elizabeth Hinkelman. 1992. Conversation acts in task-oriented spoken dialogue. Computational Intelligence, 8(3):575--599.]]

Digital Library

[81]

van Beek, Peter and Robin Cohen. 1986. Towards user specific explanations from expert systems. In Proceedings of the Sixth Canadian Conference on Artificial Intelligence, pages 194--198.]]

[82]

Walker, Marilyn. 1991. Redundancy in collaborative dialogue. In Working Notes for the AAAI Fall Symposium: Discourse Structure in Natural Language Understanding and Generation, pages 124--129.]]

[83]

Walker, Marilyn. 1992. Redundancy in collaborative dialogue. In Proceedings of the Fifteenth International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 345--351.]]

Digital Library

[84]

Walker, Marilyn. 1996. Inferring acceptance and rejection in dialog by default rules of inference. Language and Speech, 39(2-3):265--304.]]

[85]

Walker, Marilyn and Steve Whittaker. 1990. Mixed initiative in dialogue: An investigation into discourse segmentation. In Proceedings of the 28th Annual Meeting, pages 70--78. Association for Computational Linguistics.]]

Digital Library

[86]

Wilensky, Robert. 1981. Meta-Planning: Representing and using knowledge about planning in problem solving and natural language understanding. Cognitive Science, 5:197--233.]]

[87]

Young, Mark Anthony. 1987. The design and implementation of an evidence oracle for the understanding of arguments. Technical report, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.]]

Cited By

Benotti LBlackburn P(2017)Modeling the clarification potential of instructionsComputer Speech and Language10.1016/j.csl.2017.01.00845:C(536-551)Online publication date: 1-Sep-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.csl.2017.01.008
da Silva FFurtado ACiarlini APozzer CFeijó Bde Lima E(2012)Information-Gathering events in story plotsProceedings of the 11th international conference on Entertainment Computing10.1007/978-3-642-33542-6_3(30-44)Online publication date: 26-Sep-2012
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/978-3-642-33542-6_3
Benotti LBlackburn P(2011)Classical planning and causal implicaturesProceedings of the 7th international and interdisciplinary conference on Modeling and using context10.5555/2045502.2045506(26-39)Online publication date: 26-Sep-2011
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/2045502.2045506
Show More Cited By

A process model for recognizing communicative acts and modeling negotiation subdialogues
1. Hardware
  1. Power and energy
    1. Power estimation and optimization

Recommendations

Modeling negotiation subdialogues
ACL '92: Proceedings of the 30th annual meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics

This paper presents a plan-based model that handles negotiation subdialogues by inferring both the communicative actions that people pursue when speaking and the beliefs underlying these actions. We contend that recognizing the complex discourse actions ...
Recognizing complex discourse acts: a tripartite plan-based model of dialogue
Interpreting communicative acts and building a conversation model

Researchers and industry are actively developing Software Agents (SAs), autonomous software that will assist users in achieving various tasks, collaborate with them, or even act on their behalf. To explore new interaction modes for SAs which need to be ...

Comments

Please enable JavaScript to view thecomments powered by Disqus.

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image Computational Linguistics

Computational Linguistics Volume 25, Issue 1

March 1999

170 pages

ISSN:0891-2017

EISSN:1530-9312

Issue’s Table of Contents

Publisher

MIT Press

Cambridge, MA, United States

Publication History

Published: 01 March 1999

Published in COLI Volume 25, Issue 1

Qualifiers

Article

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

25
Total Citations
View Citations
423
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)11
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)1

Reflects downloads up to 24 Nov 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Benotti LBlackburn P(2017)Modeling the clarification potential of instructionsComputer Speech and Language10.1016/j.csl.2017.01.00845:C(536-551)Online publication date: 1-Sep-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.csl.2017.01.008
da Silva FFurtado ACiarlini APozzer CFeijó Bde Lima E(2012)Information-Gathering events in story plotsProceedings of the 11th international conference on Entertainment Computing10.1007/978-3-642-33542-6_3(30-44)Online publication date: 26-Sep-2012
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/978-3-642-33542-6_3
Benotti LBlackburn P(2011)Classical planning and causal implicaturesProceedings of the 7th international and interdisciplinary conference on Modeling and using context10.5555/2045502.2045506(26-39)Online publication date: 26-Sep-2011
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/2045502.2045506
Calabrese MDi Lecce VSoldo D(2010)On designing task-oriented intelligent interfacesProceedings of the Advanced intelligent computing theories and applications, and 6th international conference on Intelligent computing10.5555/1881227.1881263(229-239)Online publication date: 18-Aug-2010
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/1881227.1881263
Strzalkowski TBroadwell GStromer-Galley JShaikh STaylor SWebb NJoshi AHuang CJurafsky D(2010)Modeling socio-cultural phenomena in discourseProceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Computational Linguistics10.5555/1873781.1873898(1038-1046)Online publication date: 23-Aug-2010
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/1873781.1873898
Benotti LHealey PPieraccini RByron DYoung S(2009)Clarification potential of instructionsProceedings of the SIGDIAL 2009 Conference: The 10th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue10.5555/1708376.1708405(196-205)Online publication date: 11-Sep-2009
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/1708376.1708405
Zukerman INiemann MGeorge SAlexandersson JKnott A(2009)Balancing conflicting factors in argument interpretationProceedings of the 7th SIGdial Workshop on Discourse and Dialogue10.5555/1654595.1654621(134-143)Online publication date: 15-Jul-2009
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/1654595.1654621
Giampapa JSycara KSukthankar G(2008)Toward identifying process models in ad hoc and distributed teamsProceedings of the 1st International Working Conference on Human Factors and Computational Models in Negotiation10.1145/1609170.1609177(55-62)Online publication date: 8-Dec-2008
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1609170.1609177
Yang FHeeman PHollingshead KStrayer S(2008)DialogueviewNatural Language Engineering10.1017/S135132490600437214:1(3-32)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2008
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1017/S1351324906004372
Schatzmann JWeilhammer KStuttle MYoung S(2006)A survey of statistical user simulation techniques for reinforcement-learning of dialogue management strategiesThe Knowledge Engineering Review10.1017/S026988890600094421:2(97-126)Online publication date: 1-Jun-2006
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1017/S0269888906000944
Show More Cited By

View Options

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Article

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Issue’s Table of Contents