WHAT THE SPEAKER MEANS: THE RECOGNITION OF SPEAKERS' PLANS IN DISCOURSE

Abstract

Human conversational participants depend upon the ability of their partners to recognize their intentions, so that those partners may respond appropriately. In such interactions, the speaker encodes his intentions about the hearer's response in a variety of sentence types. Instead of telling the hearer what to do, the speaker may just state his goals, and expect a response that meets these goals at least part way. This paper presents a new model for recognizing the speaker's intended meaning in determining a response. It shows that this recognition makes use of the speaker's plan, his beliefs about the domain and about the hearer's relevant capacities.