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Speech act generation in cooperative dialogue
No full textThis paper presents a simple model for speech act
generation in cooperative dialogue. Main goal
of the dialogue is the collaborative exchange of
information so that, if the information is available,
in the final state the participants believe
the answer to an initial question. The participants'
communicative strategy is determined by
the rules of the dialogue game. On the one hand,
the rules regulate which speech act will be performed
depending on a certain information state
'of one of the participants, aIlll, on the other hand,
they dictate how an information state will change
as a result of the performance of a particular
speech act. The resulting structure of the information
exchange can be complex, since the knowledge
to find an answer to the initia! question may
be distributed among the participants and may
therefore result in subdialogues and the generation
of counter-questions
Declarative questions in discourse
No full textQuestions in spoken dialogues are often uttered in a declarative form. Since more than
50% of these questions cannot be recognized as such without contextual features, a
speaker must, at the risk of misunderstanding, have special reasons for using a declarative
form instead of an interrogative one. Two experiments were carried out to determine the contextual features that contribute to the use of a declarative question. Dialogues were presented on paper in both experiments. In the first experiment, subjects had to indicate whether a question in the dialogue was originally used in a declarative or an interrogative form; in the second, the subjects had to estimate the speaker's certainty about the correctness of the propositional content of the questions in the first experiment. The experimental results indicate that declaratives are often used for questioning if the speaker wants to verify information already provided in the dialogue and that the use of declaratives significantly correlates with the speaker's degree of certainty about the propositional content of the question. Moreover, from the experimental results it is hypothesized that abrupt changes of topic may decrease the use of declaratives
The recognition of Dutch declarative questions
No full textIn this paper I will discuss how questions in Dutch with a declarative sentence type can be recognized in isolation and in natural dialogue. Declarative questions were taken from telephone dialogues where subjects tried to get information from an information clerk at Amsterdam airport. In previous experiments these questions were isolated from the original context and presented on tape to subjects with a number of answers. A disadvantage of this method is that it is impossible to distinguish the influence of prosodic indicators from that of textual ones. Here, an experiment is described where utterances were presented on a screen to eliminate prosodic characteristics and to concentrate on textual indicators only. In the interpretation by the subjects of the declarative as a question the appearance of certain pragmatic particles plays a decisive role. In the following I will present the results of the visual experiment and describe how certain particles contribute to the responses of the subjects
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