In conversation or dialogue, people use abduction to understand reasons behind utterances. Suppose that your colleague says "I will be at my office this weekend". Then you may surmise that he/she has much work to do. In this dialogue, the utterance is considered an evidence provided by the colleague, then you seek reasons to explain the utterance. You abduce that your colleague would have much work to do if you believe the implication "much_work {contains} office weekend". Given an utterance by a speaker, a hearer could perform two different types of abduction. The first one is to produce a hearer's belief of a fact that could explain an evidence provided by a speaker. The above example is of this type of abduction. The second one is to produce a hearer's belief of a speaker's belief which could explain the speaker's utterance. In the above example, suppose that you believe that the colleague believes "much_work {contains} office weekend". Then you abduce that the colleague believes that he/she has much work to do. In this case, however, you do not necessarily believe yourself that the colleague has much work to do. In this way, a hearer may use abduction not only for generating assumption that accounts for the utterance, but for generating assumption on the belief state of a speaker who makes the utterance.
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