Communication and Miscommunication

摘要

This report discusses one aspect of enabling people to communicate in natural language with computers. The central focus of this work is a study on how one could build robust natural language processing systems that can detect and recover from miscommunication. The study of miscommunication is a necessary task within such a context since any computer capable of communicating with humans in natural language must be tolerant of the complex, imprecise, or ill-devised utterances that people often use. This goal first required an inquiry into how people communicate and how they recover from problems in communication. This led to the development of techniques for avoiding failures of reference that were employed in the reference identification component of a natural language understanding program. The traditional approaches to reference identification in previous natural language systems were found to be less elaborate than people's real behavior. To model a listener's behavior, a new component was added to the traditional reference identification mechanism to resolve difficulties in a speaker's description.