The clarification potential of instructions: Predicting clarification requests

• Event: Seminar
• Lecturer: Patrick Blackburn
• Date: 14 November 2018
• Duration: 2 hours
• Venue: Gothenburg

Slides

The hypothesis motivating this talk is that conversational implicatures are an important source of clarification requests, and in this talk I will do two main things. First, I will motivate the hypothesis in theoretical, practical and empirical terms and formulate it as a concrete Clarification Potential Principle: implicatures may become explicit as fourth-level clarification requests. Second, I will present a framework for generating the clarification potential of an instruction by inferring its conversational implicatures with respect to a particular context. I will discuss the evaluation of the framework, illustrate its performance using a human-human corpus of situated conversations, and argue that much of the inference required can be handled using classical planning.

This talk is based on joint work with Luciana Benotti of Logic, Interaction and Intelligent Systems Group, Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, Argentina.

Many of the main ideas can be found in the paper: Modeling the clarification potential of instructions: Predicting clarification requests and other reactions, by Luciana Benotti and Patrick Blackburn, Computer Speech & Language 45: 536-551 (2017)