Formal and Implemented Pragmatics

摘要

Our aim in this project was to explore the reasonings and representations that make natural language dialogs possible, using in particular the formalism of active logics. We continued worked on approaches using active logics to treat problems in dialog such as inference, commonsense reasoning, presuppositions and implicatures, and implemented and improved algorithms to handle these problems computationally. Extensive theoretical work was done on metadialog and meta-reasoning, and how these can help resolve miscommunications in dialog; in fact, the thesis was put forward that mechanisms to corrrect miscommunications are essential and central in dialog processing. Research was also done on related aspects of language and inference, particularly semantic processing of natural language discourse. We worked in these areas as well as on the design and implementation of a dialog system that exploits meta reasoning to detect and correct errors, and a natural language interface to a virtual-reality system at the Army Research Laboratory.