Toward a Speech Act Theory for Natural Language Processing

摘要

this report explores the prospects for using concepts from Speech Act Theory in the design of processes that operate on natural language. The potential benefits of creating processes to identify the illocutionary force of utterances in text are particularly significant. These benefits include systematic derivation of implicit communication, identification of relations between text and prior text, and the possibility of applying existing action-oriented knowledge within Al to new natural language processing tasks. The report not only explores these benefits and the potential uses of Speech Act Theory but also exhibits some simple processes for identifying illocutionary forces and for simulating the effects (including much implicit communication) of speech acts. (Author)