Understanding pragmatically ill-formed input

Abstract

An utterance may be syntactically and semantically well-formed yet violate the pragmatic rules of the world model. This paper presents a context-based strategy for constructing a cooperative but limited response to pragmatically illformed queries. Suggestion heuristics use a context model of the speaker's task inferred from the preceding dialogue to propose revisions to the speaker's ill-formed query. Selection heuristics then evaluate these suggestions based upon semantic and relevance criteria.