Sarcasm, Deception, and Stating the Obvious: Planning Dialogue without Speech Acts

This paper presents an alternative to the `speech acts with STRIPS' approach to implementing dialogue: a fully implemented AI planner which generates and analyses the semantics of utterances using a single linguistic act for all contexts. Using this act, the planner can model problematic conversational situations, including felicitous and infelicitous instances of bluffing, lying, sarcasm, and stating the obvious. The act has negligible effects, and its precondition can always be proved. `Speaker maxims' enable the speaker to plan to deceive, as well as to generate implicatures, while `hearer maxims' enable the hearer to recognise deceptions, and interpret implicatures. The planner proceeds by achieving parts of the constructive proof of a goal. It incorporates an epistemic theorem prover, which embodies a deduction model of belief, and a constructive logic.

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2004
• Where: AIR
• Authors: Debora Field, Allan Ramsay
• Keywords: AI Planner, AIR 2004, Planner, Single Linguistic Act