We perform a corpus analysis to develop a representation of the knowledge and reasoning used to interpret indirect speech acts. An indirect speech act (ISA) is an utterance whose intended meaning is different from its literal meaning. We focus on those speech acts in which slight changes in situational or contextual information can switch the dominant intended meaning of an utterance from direct to indirect or vice-versa. We computationalize how various contextual fea- tures can influence a speaker’s beliefs, and how these beliefs can influence the intended meaning and choice of the surface form of an utterance.
@inproceedings{sarathy2020reasoning,
title={Reasoning Requirements for Indirect Speech Act Interpretation},
author={Vasanth Sarathy and Alexander Tsuetaki and Antonio Roque and Matthias Scheutz},
year={2020},
booktitle={Proceedings of COLING 2020: The 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics},
url={https://hrilab.tufts.edu/publications/sarathy2020reasoning.pdf}
doi={10.18653/v1/2020.coling-main.433}
}