Clarification Potential of Instructions

Luciana Benotti

SIGDIAL Workshop on Discourse and Dialogue (SIGDIAL 2009)
Queen Mary University of London, September 11-12, 2009

Summary

Our hypothesis is that conversational implicatures are a rich source of clarification questions. In this paper we do two things. First, we motivate the hypothesis in theoretical, practical and empirical terms. Second, we present a framework for generating the clarification potential of an instruction by inferring its conversational implicatures with respect to a particular context. General means-ends inference, beyond classical planning, turns out to be crucial.