{murray lowrance appelt rodriguez} @ ai.sri.com The need for collaboration arises in many activities required for effective problem solving and decision making. We are developing Angler, a web-services tool that supports collaboration among participants on some focus topic. Angler overcomes some common barriers to collaboration by enabling asynchronous and distributed collaboration. Angler supports a collaboration methodology that exploits opportunities afforded by multiple participants each making contributions to the collaboration. One challenge that arises in helping participants manage their contributions and their review of others ’ contributions is determining when one contribution is very similar to another contribution. Two very similar contributions may suggest either a need to merge them or to further elaborate one or both of them. Indexes over the participant contributions are used to assess similarity across contributions and address this challenge. The indexes may comprise lexical or ontological information; the former indexes require fewer resources to deploy but the later appear to support better similarity estimates.

As evaluations of computational linguistics technology progress toward higher-level interpretation tasks, the problem of determining alignments between system responses and answer key entries may become less straightforward. We present an extensive analysis of the alignment procedure used in the MUC-6 evaluation of information extraction technology, which reveals effects that interfere with the stated goals of the evaluation. These effects are shown to be pervasive enough that they have the potential to adversely impact the technology development process. These results argue strongly for the use of accurate alignment criteria in natural language evaluations, and for maintaining the independence of alignment criteria and mechanisms used to calculate scores.

Article Free Access Share on Gemini: a natural language system for spoken-language understanding Authors: John Dowding SRI International, Menlo Park, CA SRI International, Menlo Park, CAView Profile , Jean Mark Gawron SRI International, Menlo Park, CA SRI International, Menlo Park, CAView Profile , Doug Appelt SRI International, Menlo Park, CA SRI International, Menlo Park, CAView Profile , John Bear SRI International, Menlo Park, CA SRI International, Menlo Park, CAView Profile , Lynn Cherny SRI International, Menlo Park, CA SRI International, Menlo Park, CAView Profile , Robert Moore SRI International, Menlo Park, CA SRI International, Menlo Park, CAView Profile , Douglas Moran SRI International, Menlo Park, CA SRI International, Menlo Park, CAView Profile Authors Info & Claims ACL '93: Proceedings of the 31st annual meeting on Association for Computational LinguisticsJune 1993Pages 54–61https://doi.org/10.3115/981574.981582Published:22 June 1993Publication History 43citation1,076DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations43Total Downloads1,076Last 12 Months25Last 6 weeks7 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Publisher SiteeReaderPDF

Abduction is inference to the best explanation. In the TACITUS project at SRI we have developed an approach to abductive inference, called “weighted abduction”, that has resulted in a significant simplification of how the problem of interpreting texts is conceptualized. The interpretation of a text is the minimal explanation of why the text would be true. More precisely, to interpret a text, one must prove the logical form of the text from what is already mutually known, allowing for coercions, merging redundancies where possible, and making assumptions where necessary. It is shown how such “local pragmatics” problems as reference resolution, the interpretation of compound nominals, the resolution of syntactic ambiguity and metonymy, and schema recognition can be solved in this manner. Moreover, this approach of “interpretation as abduction” can be combined with the older view of “parsing as deduction” to produce an elegant and thorough integration of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, one that spans the range of linguistic phenomena from phonology to discourse structure. Finally, we discuss means for making the abduction process efficient, possibilities for extending the approach to other pragmatics phenomena, and the semantics of the weights and costs in the abduction scheme.

A prerequisite to a theory of the way agents understand speech acts is a theory of how their beliefs and intentions are revised as a consequence of events. This process of attitude revision is an interesting domain for the application of nonmonotonic reasoning because speech acts have a conventional aspect that is readily represented by defaults, but that interacts with an agent's beliefs and intentions in many complex ways that may override the defaults. Perrault has developed a theory of speech acts, based on Rieter's default logic, that captures the conventional aspect; it does not, however, adequately account for certain easily observed facts about attitude revision resulting from speech acts. A natural theory of attitude revision seems to require a method of stating preferences among competing defaults. We present here a speech act theory, formalized in hierarchic autoepistemic logic (a refinement of Moore's autoepistemic logic), in which revision of both the speaker's and hearer's attitudes can be adequately described. As a collateral benefit, efficient automatic reasoning methods for the formalism exist. The theory has been implemented and is now being employed by an utterance-planning system.

Article Free Access Share on Some pragmatic issues in the planning of definite and indefinite noun phrases Author: Douglas E. Appelt Stanford University Stanford UniversityView Profile Authors Info & Claims ACL '85: Proceedings of the 23rd annual meeting on Association for Computational LinguisticsJuly 1985 Pages 198–203https://doi.org/10.3115/981210.981235Online:08 July 1985Publication History 8citation225DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations8Total Downloads225Last 12 Months35Last 6 weeks0 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteeReaderPDF

Planning provides the basis for a theory of language generation that considers the communicative goals of the speaker when producing utterances. One central problem in designing a system based on such a theory is specifying the requisite linguistic knowledge in a form that interfaces well with a planning system and allows for the encoding of discourse information. The TELEGRAM (TELEological GRAMmar) system described in this paper solves this problem by annotating a unification grammar with assertions about how grammatical choices are used to achieve various goals, and by enabling the planner to augment the functional description of an utterance as it is being unified. The control structures of the planner and the grammar unifier are then merged in a manner that makes it possible for general planning to be guided by unification of a particular functional description.

This paper describes how a language-planning system can produce natural-language referring expressions that satisfy multiple goals.It describes a formal representation for reasoning about several agents' mutual knowledge using possible-worlds semantics and the general organization of a system that uses the formalism to reason about plans combining physical and linguistic actions at different levels of abstraction.It discusses the planning of concept activation actions that are realized by definite referring expressions in the planned utterances, and shows how it is possible to integrate physical actions for communicating intentions with linguistic actions, resulting in plans that include pointing as one of the communicative actions available to the speaker.

This research was supported at SRI International by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency under contract N00039--79--C--0118 with the Naval Electronic Systems Command. The views and conclusions contained in this document are those of the author and should not be interpreted as representative of the official policies either expressed or implied of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or the U. S. Government. The author is grateful to Barbara Grosz, Gary Hendrix and Terry Winograd for comments on an earlier draft of this paper.