A Practical Nonmonotonic Theory For Reasoning About Speech Acts
by Appelt, Douglas and Konolige, Kurt
Technical Note 432
Institution: AI Center, SRI International
Address: 333 Ravenswood Ave., Menlo Park, CA 94025
Apr 1988.
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 Reiter’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.
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Appelt, Doug E | Alumnus |  |
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Konolige, Kurt G | Alumnus | |
