A case study on the relevance of the competence assumption for implicature calculation in dialogue systems

Abstract

The competence assumption (CA) concerns the estimation of a user that an implicature, derived from an utterance generated in a dialogue or recommender system, reflects the epistemic state of the system about the validity of alternative expressions. The CA can be assigned globally or locally. In this paper, we present an experimental study on the effects of locally and globally assigned competence in a sales scenario. The results of this study suggest that dialogue systems should include means for modelling global competence and that assigning local competence does not improve the pragmatic competence of a dialogue system.