C. Raymond Perrault

Analyzing intention in utterances

This paper describes a model of cooperative behavior and describes how such a model can be applied in a natural language understanding system. We assume that agents attempt to recognize the plans of other agents and, then, use this plan when deciding what response to make. In particular, we show that, given a setting in which purposeful dialogues occur, this model can account for responses that provide more information that explicitly requested and for appropriate responses to both short sentence fragments and indirect speech acts.

On the Mathematical Properties of Linguistic Theories

Metatheoretical findings regarding the decidability, generative capacity, and recognition complexity of several syntactic theories are surveyed. These include context-free, transformational, lexical-functional, generalized phrase structure, tree adjunct, and stratificational grammars. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of these results with respect to linguistic theory.

Some problems in planning indirect speech acts

A competence theory of speech acts should account at least for the relationship between the intentions and beliefs of the speaker of an utterance (including his beliefs about his hearers beliefs and intentions), and the form of the utterance. What utterances can be used in what contexts to convey what intentions?

Augmented tranśition networks and their relation to tree transducers

Abstract Augmented Transition Network Parsers (ATN) were defined by Woods and used by him in a natural language understanding system. Every recursively enumerable set is recognizable by an ATN. We define the Basic ATN, a limited class of ATN, and show that the languages accepted by this class are exactly those generated by a single top-down finite-state tree transducer, as defined by Rounds and Thatcher. These languages are known to be context-sensitive but have an NP-complete recognition problem.