Humans often use indirect speech acts (ISAs) when issuing directives. Much of the work in handling ISAs in computational dialogue architectures has focused on correctly identifying and handling the underlying non-literal meaning. There has been less attention devoted to how linguistic responses to ISAs might differ from those given to literal directives and how to enable different response forms in these computational dialogue systems.
@inproceedings{briggsscheutz17strategies,
title={Strategies and Mechanisms to Enable Dialogue Agents to Respond Appropriately to Indirect Speech Acts},
author={Gordon Briggs and Matthias Scheutz},
year={2017},
booktitle={Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN), 26th IEEE International Symposium on},
url={https://hrilab.tufts.edu/publications/briggsscheutz17strategies.pdf}
}