AI Seminar
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    Tuesday, March 2nd, 2004
    4:00 pm - 5:30 pm
    175 ATL (Large Conference Room)

    "Coordinating Understanding and Generation in an Abductive
     Approach to Interpretation"

    Rich Thomason
    Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
    University of Michigan




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     I'll explain how an abductive approach can
be used to describe coordinated processes of understanding,
generation and accommodation in dialogue.

     Abduction is used not only to understand an utterance
by explaining it, but to manage the dynamics, of the context
supporting intepretation and generation.  Conversational agents
update the dialogue uniformly for their own and their
interlocutors' utterances, by accommodating a new context, inferred
abductively, in which utterance content is both true and prominent.

     The generator plans natural and comprehensible utterances by
exploiting the same abductive preferences used in understanding.

     I illustrate our approach by formalizing and implementing
some interactions between information structure and the form of
referring expressions.

     This is joint work with Mathew Stone.